The work “Feast of Fools” signed Mad Meg enters the Museum of Fine Arts in Nancy
You have to see it to believe it. See it really and up close! To discern, for example, a tiny dripping of ink on an ant’s head, which suddenly gives the full measure of this vertiginous work: yes, this spectacular work, which then imposes distance in order to be able to be perceived as a whole, has indeed been entirely made by hand, with pen and Indian ink! Its creator did not fully discover it herself until years after its completion, since Mad Meg could not unroll all of its 8.74 m long and 1.52 m high until the opportunity for a Parisian exhibition, in 2019, at the Halle Saint-Pierre. The artist, born in Lyon in 1976, took two good years to compose in his small interior his life-size version of the famous Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), small lines by small lines, character by character, unwinding and rewinding a roll of thick white paper. While simultaneously leading many other projects, each more powerful than the next, such as its “Patriarchs” or “Sisters” that we also discover today in Nancy and for the first time in a museum thanks to to “Margot the enraged”.
A fantastic exhibition nourished by masterpieces by Grandville, Callot or Henner, but which will not win « Feast of Fools » when it closes on January 31, 2021: the graphic work is now part of the Nancy collections… and that’s good! Because she tells so many things, this “feast of imbeciles”, this “feast of fools” … that she deserved museum time!
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A macabre photo by Joel-Peter Witkin of decaying human limbs not only gave its title to the work of the designer, who, to cruelly overturn the original purpose of the Last Supper, also reproduced it as a nativity satanic in front of the central character of the painting… who also wears his own ring on his finger. The self-portrait is never far away in Mad Meg’s work. It has the scathing criticism, but the acute awareness of living there, in this Western society eaten away by profit.
Deeply committed, the artist, whose gesture is so reminiscent of that of the engraver, ingests everything: feminism, colonialism, ecology, capitalism, cannibalism, the history of art … And his enraged digestive notebooks Then comes a drawn analysis of the world. It’s bluffing. No, the tablecloth is not decorated with fine stripes: in tiny but perfectly legible writing, Mad Meg copied a Jack London novel there… We therefore find the powerful patriarchs, instead of the apostles surrounding Jesus for his last meal, bourgeois in costume and seated in front of a multitude of references to old paintings. But with an insectoid head. From the crawling and swarming animal genre, the artist makes colonizers who devour everything even our own thoughts. The “eaters” as La Boétie said. But if they are immense and sometimes chimerical under the pen of Mad Meg, they are according to her insects disguised as a man… and not the other way around. So here are dominant males who have become crushable beings in their turn. Because if the question was posed until now of the power of humanity, that which is essential from now on is well that of its limits …
Valérie SUSSET
The Nancy Museum of Fine Arts (54) is open every day except Tuesday. This work will interact with the insect collections of the Muséum Aquarium on the occasion of Museums Night on November 14th.
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