English presentation

All of RK's drawings speak endlessly - obsessively- of the same terrible event that we must never allow to be erased from our minds- never.
Completely authentic, her figures implore, moan, remind us of the dreadful historical reality that RK and her family endured.
With their hands folded, crooked, raised towards the sky, each tragic figure that she calls up for us and before us, asks, " What is there after the camps ?"
That's why her work fits into a hideous circle of raw feelings, of the fight against oblivion : and because men are shadows in the drawings, they plumb those painful innermost recesses, bringing to light even more acutely the lamento of human beings.
Sometimes we are moved by lonely mortals or by a sad, gaunt, wan child desparately clinging to its mother, sometimes by an atrocious, indistinct crowd gathering in communal wailing.
They are all fundamentally lonely.
Alone.
They are searching.
Empty and full gazes, blind and sighted, marked by the outrageousness of the shock, tormented by the horror, by the refusal to accept torture, that unbearable ordeal which they suffered and which has made them what they are now; they are nothing but eyes dug out, excavated by fear, orbits sunken by terror, pupils widened, dilated, forever unappeased.
Those appalling masks stare boldly at the world- at its
grotesque deception-expressionless; they stare into the depth of the traumatizing injury.
Inscrutable faces, tightly woven.
Disproportionate heads, inordinately shut, shattered, eroded.
Intimately.
Knees to the earth, neck bending beneath the intolerable reality, they are ashes and cries, they are dead.
Emaciated, fleshless arms - thin slivers of clay- fragile, strangely flexible, sharp silhouettes... bare bodies, dislocated, disarticulated, destroyed, charred by so much obscurity.
Imprints with wrinkled faces, stunted fragments.
Curled up.
So disarming.
They are delicate shadows clinging to hope, powerless skeletons exhausted, suffering, kneeling, crushed and persecuted, unsteady, their bones broken, their muscles weakened, useless.
The words are stuck in their throat corroded by silence : RK will never stop screaming for them.
Each stroke of the pencil, each stroke of the pen by that tormented artist is a pointed finger, scolding and suffering. There can be repentance through painting ... rarely has a word been so full of meaning...
perpetually in her head
constantly
the weight of the dead
the dead
the dead
the dead

too heavy
rosemarie

For evermore she "weaves a shroud," embroiders, spins, weaves.... deep wound born from extermination.
She writes " I was there in 1943-1945" and the arrow on the " Map of concentration camps" points out sinister stains streaked with gloom." Fifty years after the end of world war II and the liberation of the nazi camps :
in honor of my family, DESTROYED."
Destroyed.
Elsewhere, other ominous signs, abysses of bitter torment.
Traced arrows, and, engraved, the words " My family."
Destroyed.
I was here... My family...There...The maps and the camps... Streaked with indignity...The dead... on atlases... Black...
Like her works, viscerally, right down to the colour, in points, lines, echoes of sharp wounds, of the departed- never healed, never completely thought out, long- gone martyrs, present, in a stroke of charcoal, of soot, always, invariably, there.
Rosemarie etched in her flesh, Rosemarie destroyed, who remembers and recalls again and again, from shroud to shroud.
Maimed.
Forever.
Rosemarie lays down her graphic tears on gauze, no doubt to make up for that which she was not permitted to apply to the gaping entrails of remembrance.
Of memory.
All of civilization accountable for the deaths, the massacres.
rosemarie
imploring
in the cruelty of the camps
pourquoi
pourquoi
why

rosemarie in a death camp still in the hollows of death still in death still and without end for ever and ever condemned definitively to reminiscence and a rending apart for what you have done thank you

The mischievous painter-sculptor, Guallino, whose strong, intense works, created by tracing around forms and assembling materials reminiscent of Ali Baba's cave, are characterized by shimmering, wild tones. One might be reminded of a warm saraband. They are comforting works, yet quiver with a host of anthropomorphic people, troubled, desirous, pulpy female bodies depicting a variety of beings and marvellous animals-- all overwhelming. Guallino's art is this very capacity to draw lines and to recreate the world through bright colours. He delights in chiselling velvety shapes, wolves, loving couples, Little Red Riding Hood or a unicorn. In the shadows a woman is smiling, dragons are spitting flames of reassuring, budding sap peeling off in layers, while funny crocodiles appear with the inevitable role ...of drying tears! As for the giraffes, he was told as a child that they were combed. To these dominant figures he adds bits of texts and secrets that are often illegible, along with fascinating scribblings and palimpsests full of humour and tenderness. Anything may serve as a reference.

When the spectator strolls through this multicoloured world of Guallino's, he is drawn into the vivacious landscapes and greeted by surprises at every turn: in the corner of a triptych, in the mirror of a statue, in the attractive hollows and outlines, in the mixing of flamboyant nuances, of a stained-glass window, in dizzy mazes and meanders, in black rings around eyes, in the clear flowing, this magician of balance with his dazzling palette recalls a spray of smells from another world.

This artist is also an illustrator. He tirelessly pursues his task throughout the iridescences of everyday life. While tragic, serious and unpredictable, he also proves to be playful and baroque in his contemporary primitivism.

He's first of all a poet: in this polyphonic artist, childhood comes back to life. His is a world of play surrounded by a halo.