Nina Léger
When I arrived, the sky behind the window was dense and gray.
How many meters high, how many wide, is this window? Five, six, more? An entire wall given to the sky.
The other walls: all white, one gray.
On the floor, parquet;
And wooden trestles,
white-painted planks,
a white-painted shelf,
white-painted shelves.
Then objects placed here and there — opaque blocks, smooth surfaces, right angles, stopped light, and here, just here, three onion peels.
[Le ciel, même — On a glass plate, she cut out shapes similar to the tiny patches of sky that could be seen when pressing one’s nose up, looking up, against the window of a gallery located on the ground floor of a narrow Parisian alley; this was her contribution to the gallery's group exhibition.]
Everything was perfectly in its place: the onion peels seemed to have found their rightful position, the only one possible; the shadows were there, never to move. I looked at the sky again, and it had turned white. The clouds unraveled, tearing apart like cotton balls.
[Les ombres calmes — at a certain moment of the day, in a small, austere hotel room reminiscent of the cells where Piero della Francesca painted his frescoes in backlight, she observed the subtle shades that shadowed the white of each wall, depending on its exposure to the single window. She translated this light into paint, repainting each wall with its unique hue: she doubled the shadow and captured the moment.]
And in fact, she showed me that in the studio, things never had a definitive place. Objects on the shelf, tables, trestles, a block of wood placed in front of the window, a granite bar stretched across the floor: these arrangements were precarious; like the sky, they shifted. At one point, she moved an entire table from the middle of the room to its side. A revolution. There must have been creaks, friction, and impacts when she did that, but her gesture was so precise, so attuned to the space and the way to navigate it, that I perceived nothing. The only sounds I really heard, and heard loudly, were my own — my footsteps, my movements, my voice — intrusive noises that echoed harshly, sounds incapable of infusing the space, of sliding in and taking their place like the objects did. Perhaps that’s why she said the studio was a fragile place.
[La chambre 7 — once again in the tiny hotel room, she realized that when spread out, the sheet that bordered her bed covered the width of the space. With sheets similar to the one on her bed, she created a pattern mirroring the layout of the room. She sewed the piece with the sheets and then folded them into a rectangle, placing it on the tiled floor. In the photograph, the rectangle appears so compact that it looks as if the fabric has been soaked in plaster.]
She spoke about her works, holding them in her hands when they were within reach, gesturing in the space when they weren't, and using words like place, move, set down, light, presence, spot, cut, baseboard.
Suddenly, the sky behind the glass was a piercing blue—sunlit rooftops, clouds vanished..
She opened her laptop to show me images of installations. To avoid reflections on the screen, she grabbed a book and propped it under the keyboard, naming its author by first name. It would amuse me if one day she took one of my novels and said, 'We're going to use Nina to adjust the brightness.' But my novels aren't thick enough. That book, titled Pierre, was over a thousand pages and contained collected works.
She took out frames wrapped in tissue paper, and with her gloved hands, she manipulated the paper—unfolding, refolding, refolding again—to improvise supports for her frames. White paper was used to prevent the white wood of one frame from touching the white wood of the table. Watching her, I realized that her work emerges from the interstice between two seemingly similar colors. She observes the degrees of the world—the degree of brightness, the angle of inclination, the shade of white, or the precision of a cut—and plays with their variations or harmonies.
[La forme empruntée — the ceiling of a cellar was uneven; through casting, she took its imprint and then installed the cast on the floor of the room directly above the cellar—an exploration of the space between below and above.]
She put away Pierre, and I left the studio. The clouds returned, bringing darkness. For a moment, I hoped for an obsession: that the studio would follow me, overlaying the images of the city, demanding to be written immediately, insisting on its text, stamping its feet, crying out now, crying out right away.
Of course, it didn't happen that way: it’s impossible with a place like that. With a place like this, one had to fold the memory, let the hours pass, change the lights, then unfold the memory, reposition the gray wall, the white walls, the large window, wondering, 'This glass... how many meters high, how wide?' It required arranging the shelves, the compact objects, the onion skins, rediscovering the movement of the skies and Estèla’s gestures—those gestures so precise that I remembered them better than her face.
Finally, one had to find the right place for the shadows, and there, wait until words settled gently on their calm surfaces.
Nina Léger, Même les ombres étaient à leur place, 2018
for the journal Le Chassis