The exhibition Michaux/Hessie. Éternité des gestes analyses the relationship —both formal and conceptual— between the work of Hessie (born Carmen Lydia Duric, Jamaica, 1933 – Paris, 2017) and that of Henri Michaux (Namur, 1899 – Paris, 1984) for the first time. With more than 40 works, including oils, gouaches, embroideries and collages, the show offers an extensive journey through the work of both artists with a twofold aim: on the one hand, to explore the influence of Michaux’s work on that of Hessie and how it served as a stimulus; and on the other, to bring to public attention the work of Hessie, an extraordinary artist still largely unknown to the general public. In fact, this is the first time that such a representative selection of her career has been shown in Catalonia.

Fabienne Dumont, in the catalogue text, describes the relationship between the two in the following terms: “For Henri Michaux, ‘art is what helps one escape inertia’; for Hessie, a ‘survival art’ (…). The coming together of these two worlds highlights an exploration of the proliferative (…). These two vibrant and captivating bodies of work immerse us in a meditative reading, a liberation of writing, a recording of the forces and the chaos of the mind.” This exhibition illustrates how the different approaches these two artists adopted to express and visually describe the depths of their thought produced a body of work that often shares the same formal qualities. While Michaux, from the 1950s to the 1980s, leaned towards a feverish activity and creative processes based on rapidity in order to ‘travel’ into the unconscious and deny reason the dominance it exerts over all our creative pursuits, Hessie —particularly throughout the 1970s—embraced a repetitive calm and immersed herself in the slowness of embroidering hundreds of stitches on cotton fabrics with a similar aim: “Time allows thoughts to wander,” she would say. But above all, she did so with the intention of exposing the society and the life surrounding her. For Hessie, sewing became a vehicle of resistance and denunciation. As she put it, “in our lives we are surrounded by bars everywhere, even in our ambitions and our achievements. Sometimes the bars are invisible. And I have made the bars visible.”

This duality between an accelerated universe —that of Michaux— and a slowed-down one —that of Hessie— finds its fullest expression in two films included in the exhibition: Éric Duvivier’s Images du monde visionnaire (1963), in which Michaux reconstructs the alterations brought about by the use of hallucinogens; and Trans Perce Survie (1974), a film by Mythia Kolesar showing the simple, free and slow rituals of Hessie. As Dumont notes in the catalogue, “the immersion of both artists in a repetition of gesture expands the experience and reaches an ineffable state, benefiting the creation of primary signs.”

Indeed, it is these ‘primary signs’ and the interest in dreams, madness and the obsessive need to surpass the limits of reason that we find in Michaux which, despite his being a solitary, independent artist not affiliated with any movement or group, made him something of a cult figure. Besides Hessie, Michaux was admired and followed by many other artists, poets and writers. Among them we might highlight Jean Paulhan, Alain Jouffroy, Serge Sautreau, André Velter, Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miró, Francis Bacon, Zao Wou-Ki, Antoni Tàpies, Georges Noël, Roberto Matta, Miguel Rué, Manuel Duque, Apel·les Fenosa and even Mercè Rodoreda, who admired him deeply although she never managed to meet him in person. Her books Travels and Flowers and Death and Spring are full of Michauxian echoes. With the aim of showing the impact Michaux’s work had on other artists in his circle, the exhibition also devotes a room to works by several of these figures.

I was still writing in snatches. It was impossible for me to compose continuously and freely. Everything came in snatches, very small snatches, isolated words, bits of sentences, comparisons, sometimes only the correction of a word that had arrived half an hour before, never several whole sentences one after the other. Nevertheless, at the end of three weeks, these little scraps “held” a subject, having been guided secretly but deliberately by the compass of an unforgettable North.

Henri Michaux, Misérable Miracle, 1956*

[Quotation chosen by Hessie and published in the catalogue of her exhibition at the Lund Museum, Sweeden, in 1978]

Linear writing, a poem of knots where memory is unravelled like a rosary through time; the eternity of gestures that encompasses worlds multiplied by the desire to survive – the sighted and the blind gathering in a summons to the tactile senses – the full void – absence and presence of matter that allows one to glimpse or divine other abysses, spiralling growths, tendrils of light, flexible ones. The allusion to space is found through matter.

Hessie, Knots & Ligatures, Paris, Centre national des Arts plastiques, 1983