The edge of emptiness.
These “painted places” by Ann Grim. Let’s open our eyes to the questioning, “are we there” or “are we here”. “Or the opposite”? A loss of landmarks, like the strange sensation we feel when we wake up from a deep sleep. Lost, the glance slides on these smooth and milky valleys and clings on to these ridges biting the light. It’s human, one searches for the center, the dashes arrive at a cross, the treasure. In vain, the Omphalos is inevitably placed at the extreme edge of the canvas. Beyond that, there is the other, the unimaginable, the Khôra, a matrix that swings into the imponderable. This terra incognita, traditionally populated by Chimeras’, is commuted to the cartography of our fantasies, but also of our fears. Could it be a mirror of our collective suicide?
Ann Grim, if one refers to her career, is a subtle whistleblower. We are now the only creators of ourselves, orphans and surprised. Faced with our guilty conscience of the crime of lèse-planet, of lèse-humanity, she gives us a map. At a time when “the virtual” and “reality become confused, a “true” painting, on a canvas with a wooden frame, invites us to the feast of the possible, so that the unimaginable is not the unthinkable.
Thierry de Beaumont
Art critic, journalist
Art critic, journalist