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For Fluide, Sophie Langohr has integrated three enamelled plaques into the west façade of Notre-Dame d’el Vaux Church. By working on format, materials and colour, the screen printed images evoke abandoned billboards. They are also reminiscent of the old tombstones that are imbedded in the other walls of the church. Although these bas-reliefs have been partly obliterated over time, they are referred to as “talking stones”; “dumb because the majority of them have lost their identifying inscription but nevertheless saying a great deal if you examine their elements “, a principle of interpretation that Sophie Langohr adopts for these pieces.
The artist also draws inspiration from another one of Thuin’s historical facts: the story of Victor Hugo passing through the town in 1861. The writer visited Aulne and it is said that under the influence of the abandoned abbey’s mystical atmosphere, he left his signature – now gone – on one of the walls of the ruins. With this installation, tinged with themes common to Victor Hugo such as the modern world, history, religion and politics, Sophie Langohr plays on the durability of her intervention. The permanence of the work involves a two-sided approach: form, i.e. the anticipation of decay; and content, i.e. the question of the survival of the images and beliefs.
Besides provoking confusion between past and present, these three portraits, reconstituted from multiple iconographic sources, give rise to doubt on the very nature of the work. Indeed, in this case, the infographic treatment hybridizes the conventional genres of painting, photography, bas-relief and posters.
Jean-M. Horemans, Les pierres parlantes de l’église Notre-Dame-del-Vaux à Thuin, héritières lointaines de Rogier de le pasture dans Revue Sambre et Meuse n°40.
