Véronique Joumard
Véronique Joumard : œuvres 1985-1998, Dijon, le Consortium, 1998
→Gauthier Michel, Rian Jeff, Le Restif Claire, Véronique Joumard, Dijon, Les Presses du réel, 2010
Véronique Joumard, RADAR, Bayeux, 5 April – 25 May 2014
→Véronique Joumard: To Telescope, Frac Normandie, Caen, 17 September – 31 December 2016
Véronique Joumard: To Telescope at the Frac Normandie French multimedia artist.
It could be said that Véronique Joumard is an artist of light who follows in the historic lineage of Minimalism (Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier), although this would be a simplification. Everything in her body of work, from photographs to installations and paintings, summons light, whether natural (sun, moon, lightning) or artificial (light bulbs, neon sign, projectors). In the mid-1980s, she created pieces made of simple glowing resistance. These creations do not hide the mechanism that makes electricity possible: they rather exhibit the device in all of its “dangerousness”. An artist of anti-illusionism, she uses wires, cables, sockets and plugs as integral elements in her installations, just as the light that they emit.
From this comes the singularity of her creations, which do not really have “a chromatic or compositional ambition; they deliver an electro-photonic fact in all of its elementarity,” as M. Gauthier writes in a book dedicated to her work. Her luminous devices do not mark an ideology of light announcing or revealing any truth or transcendence. Instead, they cause visual disturbance, to the point of a blinding glare.
© Éditions des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2013
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2019
