MONA ROUSSETTE

The magnetic fields of Mona Roussette

In front of the painted compositions of Mona Roussette, one remains as well dazzled as taken aback.  Especially when one learns that she is a self-taught one, while one is fond of the museums and one swears only by the history of the art.  For his spontaneous art is an expression at once "wild" and eminently refined.  It is a fact that no school ever put to the test his talent that flows from source, no teaching intervened to erect a screen of preconceived ideas between the picture and the fury of the painter.  Even when one is unaware of the history of this artist, the way that drove her as far as its astonishing pictures, one can, in any innocence, grant them his admiration and attribute them the title of small masterpieces. 

When one knows that it is a matter of an artist without previous formation and that she works thanks to an innate artistic instinct, without references and possible inheritances, the admiration that she gives rise to, is followed by a feeling of immense astonishment.  For it is a matter of accomplished works that can find completely their place in the modern creation and that one can easily compare- to their advantage- to other works of the classical modernity. 

It is a matter, in majority, of canvases of rather average sizes – from the small ones until one meter sixty -, that is to say of "reasonable" sizes that do not impose a domineering arrogance: their dimensions are completely able to suit our environment.  They are consequently pictures that one wants to have with oneself, just as well for their harmony of tonic colours, as for their forms and their suggestive and well stable compositions.  Their sparkling aspect endowed with a delightful vibration is of an extraordinary decorative strength. 

Because Mona Roussette, all self-taught one that she is, is inhabited by an identity inheritance that does not lack to show itself in all the metamorphosises of his paint.  One cannot look at its pictures without thinking that the artist belongs to the Arabic civilization renowned as aniconique:  Little imports if she began painting with a certain delay and in a western universe.  The regulated rhythmically lines of arabesques and moucharabieh constituted his natural universe as early as childhood.  Once put to the work, the artist conquered very quickly and of striking manner what Pond called "the decorative one" which discovered itself at the time of his trip to Morocco and that printed any sound work.  It is a matter, according to him, of an expression "that does not live in the passion that bursts on a face but that is in the very disposal of the picture and composition: the art to arrange in a decorative way the various elements of which the painter disposes to express its feelings".  It is a matter therefore of art of the motive, the art of the abstracted well ordered forms, the art of coloured jubilation of a world free of the human face that western anthropomorphism imposed us.  Mona Roussette adopted it and with the time possessed it in an admirable way.  When she begins painting a flower bouquet, is to describe impassable beauty of the nature.  If it arrives her to observe its wonders, the complexity of the leaves, the elegance of the stems, the velvety petals, the flora in all his splendour, it is rather to dive herself in the big dictionary of the forms and coloured reports that offers the natural world.  His instinct drives her surely towards a very personal organization of all these elements.  Its flowers become constellations of signs; motives burst and multiply themselves for the pleasure of the look, the euphoria and the quietness of the soul.  Besides, these flowers sign are treated with the same spontaneous offhand manner that one meets in its pure abstractions.  The joy of the supplementary ones dominates in its compositions: the red spots sing on made blue fields, the violets on the yellow one: all is done to stimulate the view, to awaken the mechanisms of the pleasure. 

While looking at these pictures, one wonders who learned so well to Mona the power of simultaneous contrasts, the skilful combine of the textures, the precious mixtures of which the effects call us by far urgently.  She acknowledged us that she did not have master, or to paint, or for the other arts that she exercises with an ease that renders us perplexed.  For our happiness, she chooses painting as means of predominant expression.  It is an exuberant temperament as well as sincere that throws itself in her art with a wild enthusiasm.  Translate the feelings in coloured matters provoke a sort of drunkenness that sets his touch going. 

Because Mona paints with her fingers.  Painting directly with its hands is as old a manner as the world.  Nevertheless Mona Roussette not tinged wild drive of the primitive act.  Her steps remain knowing and delicate.  To this tactile approach it is not more necessary to see something than one can resemble "the gestural art".  It is not a matter of strokes of brush or of something else, violent and disorderly: it is caresses that she lavishes to her pictures.  Play with the coloured matter, collect it, combine it, give him a consistency smooth and brilliant, to direct it to the four corners of the canvas, redistributing its wealths until the all takes a corresponding satisfactory form to a sort of imaginative narration it is an act that recalls what one does with a music ultra sensitive instrument.  Vibrations obtained by the handling of the colour result in a completely comparable harmony to the one of the musical sentences.  Mona Roussette is not at all systematic.  His inexhaustible fantasy drives her still in new domains.  Her flowers, sometimes pulpy, sometimes in semis, are organized of thousand manners putting in value one in demand chromatics.  But the "bloomed" practice can also, by a simple sliding of mood, convert itself in totally abstracted composition.  Thus the picture, a spangle of stains is replaced by motives in spirals on worked tints in watermarks, or even on an united tablecloth of interlaces drawn with the back of the brush to create the better effect.  Elsewhere "empty spaces" covered with smooth and clear matters seem to attain jumbled depths.  At last, in another kind of canvass, the funds spread themselves in vast vibratory ranges where the coloured melted pate form of the luminescent horizons recalling the sunsets of Turner.  There is also another category of more structured canvass where the work of the brushes that follows the one of the hand gets over it.  In this case, the outlines of the forms specify themselves, introducing more nervousness and narration. 

A series treated in monochromes entrains us in a blue made spatiality where forms swim as in certain pictures of Kupka.  The big trump of this paint is the coloured quality of its paste.  Sometimes worked in thickness sometimes in transparency - the skilful and warm fingers of the artist know how to draw from it a maximum splendour-; she hangs the light and does to sing the more muffled tones. For ten years of work, Mona Roussette attained a big mastery.  Its pictures are the products of the double treatment that she lavishes to them: the action of caress, instinctive, expressionist and the one of the brush that the brings her back to the order, to the history of the paint, to the rational one of which she distrusts, but that she knows also to accomplish.  She declares nevertheless that she prefers to use her fingers.  This supposes not only a direct action on his materials; it makes obvious a bodily contact, a magnetic transmission that transforms the painted space thanks to his intense discharge.  The registered sensation on the picture radiates and seduced the look disrupts the senses of the spectator.  This is there where the work of Mona Roussette takes all his power.  By the intermediary of its pictures, the artist succeeds transmitting a sort of appeasement, an almost therapeutic love.  It is a gift that, I dare to say, goes beyond the painting. 

Eurydice Trichon-Milsani, Art critic.

Mona Roussette, France