“I like to go into caves to feel, to see, to breathe the silence, the night, the humidity, the movement of the floors and the folds of the walls, the darkness. Also for sketching. I go there to share a moment of emotion with these old paintings and engravings which are full of the energy of those who made them. There is a freedom that stretches, spreads, overturns, piles up, a world in motion, without borders, without end. I like the absence of a frame, the freedom of the design that escapes into the world around it. When I look at their paintings, I rediscover the strength of their presence, of their desire to exist. But what seems most surprising to me is to feel so close in the creation of these people so distant in time.
RMC
Fruit of an interest in prehistory that became a passion, it was in 2009 that RMC began its journey back to the sources of art. She visits in her quest most of the prehistoric museums and sites still accessible in France, and recreates her graphic universe from the forms that arise from the walls of caves. The trigger occurs in Bernifal, near Eyzies-de-Tayac, a confidential cave whose visit is made with rudimentary lighting which, on the rugged walls, gives life to a fantasy world. From these reliefs, where the Magdalenians had seen and drawn mammoths, bison, horses, she extracts the supernatural figures that populate her imagination, a fantastic bestiary freed from pictorial conventions, which she transcribes in her drawings and paintings.
In 2010 and 2011, R.M.C. continues his explorations of caves, decorated or not, his documentary research and his graphic experiments. The result is a series of drawings and paintings that are the subject of several artist’s books, a mode of expression to which she then devotes herself fully.
2011 and 2012 are the occasion of a series of residences at the Museum of Prehistory of Lussac-les-Châteaux which allow her to come into direct contact with one of the little-known treasures of the Magdalenian, the engraved stones of the cave of La Marche, old of 14000 years, where she draws a fertile inspiration. Her work of observation and internalization of stones led her to produce, mixing her line with that of engravers, dozens of works in pastel, Indian ink and gouache, Pierres rêvées (Dreamed stones), which will be then exhibited at the Sabline Museum, in Lussac-les-châteaux, then in 2014 in Brussels and in 2016 in Le Mans, at the Jean-Claude Boulard-Carré Plantagenet Museum.
Ombres de Bernifal
Les Combarelles. Engraved cave of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac. 14000 years BP
It was a black hole with drawings from head to toe. It was dark and the horses were running on a small light. We were going back in time. How much wet time spent in this dark? The bent head listened to the silence, a silence of flowing water. It was not cold, but frozen like a happy grave. We walked like shells piled up with just our steps in the head. Before history there was a story of standing men, of human men walking or crawling in the night. Men crawling to paint. The painting had won. Death was dead. RMC
