Cendrine Rovini’s exhibition, Liquide Vermeil, takes us into an emphatically feminine world where female images reign.

First off the proverbial relationship between women and blood. A rich and intimate mystery which has the power to fascinate man but whose deepest meaning constantly eludes him. The artist presents her creatures as strangely beautiful women who play with and enjoy their own femininity to the point of intoxication. An overflow of blood become flowers, a flow of tears become hair, a face rain, horns erupt in the shape of delicate, wild plants. In works such as Toutesoie and Foisons, Cendrine Rovini’s female creatures cover themselves in a natural fur, allowing their fertile sexuality to flourish : strange flowers escape from the corolla of their vulva, literally embodying pleasure.

The artist also uses magical qualities to explore the imagery of her themes: alliances, connections, strange marriages and metamorphosis. Her work makes marriages with vegetation or with the animal world, creating a disturbing concoction which somehow remains gentle on the eye. Metamorphosis seems to stem directly from Ovid, but goes further and suggests myths not yet invented. In every case, the work celebrates and praises the living through the multiple aspects of the female body.

The artist sources these images in the twilight zone of consciousness. She explores the moment on the edge, between sleep and waking and before the body falls completely into slumber. It is in that hypnagogic moment; on the edge of a great depth of the unconcious, that the ‘I’ rids itself of its apparel of the day and accepts its deliverance, to melt, to be transformed, to be combined with whatever will come.

Le sentier de perles noires reflects on the passage into the becoming something other. A red mask of a bird is superimposed over the face of a stunned woman, while in Toute Plongée the notion inspired by Bachelard enables imagination to distort the images. Here, identity is not lost but merely reconstructed and incorporated into other elements, and through her sexual fantasies woman is opened up to her own animality, even to animism. Le sentier des buées is also representative of another of the artist’s preoccupations: to erase. The delicate form of a woman is only visible by virtue of the outline of her body, the lines of her face vanish into a multitude of raindrops which are like fertile tears and feed the delicate plants on her back. A lunar mask watches over this transparent ritual.

In Cendrine Rovini’s work, matter and the invisible work naturally with each other. Our own astonishment when faced with her images can sometimes be seen in the eyes of the women she represents who, themselves, appear to be stunned by their own metamorphosis.

Here we are not faced with abstract concepts that would only serve to uphold and justify the work of the artist, in fact it is the opposite which is true. These sensitive works celebrate a material conception of the imagination which represents a carnal union with the world in a sort of controlled violence, as if contained by a visible beauty.

A space which would respect this mysterious quality and would welcome Cendrine Rovini’s dreams was needed, and the Da-End Gallery is the ideal space to contain this Liquide Vermeil.

- Michaël Ludwig, psychologist and poet Aurillac, october 2011