Presented on February 25, at the French Institute, within the monthly programme “The Images’ Workshop” (second season, 6th episode) the video film Discours mou et mat occasions the presentation of Gina Pane’s portrait (1939 – 1990). The movie presents one of the artist’s performances that took place at Galeria De Appel in July 28, 1975, where the role of the camera was rather a passive one, the intensity and the significance of the event being induced by the reading aloud a poem and by the very well- balanced movements of the interpreter.
Besides, the performance and the installation are the two vectors of the artistic expression that recommends Gina Pane- the body becoming “the material and the object of her discourse.”
Born at Biarritz, Gina Pane settled at the beginning of the ’60 in Paris, where she studied visual arts at Ecole des Beaux-Arts; she participated at the The Workshop of Sacred Art initiated by Maurice Denis in 1919. In the name of this education or at least of this symbolic affinity, the contemporary art researchers place the artist’s closeness to the sacred area, because to the end of her career she focuses upon the lives of the martyrs as the nucleus of her inspiration. Nevertheless, Gina Pane’s debut is concerned in the first place with nature “as a poetic force, as a place of memory and of energy” according to Anna Tronche. Her first paintings were exhibited in the ’60 at Simone Heller Gallery. Gina Pane’s option was formulated in the favor of the geometrical compositions and of the concrete art.
The artist’s first actions and performances are taking place in workshops and in intimacy, and afterwards, at the beginning of the ’70 they are displayed in public. Many times, by exposing to situatie limita, both physically and psychologically, themes like love, pain, death, spirituality, or confidence in the metaphorical force of art become central to Gina Pane’s discourse.
The attack upon her body, according to rigorously built scenarios, documented photographically or video, reaches the maximum intensity in The Sentimental Action from 1973. “I hurt myself, but I never mutilate myself (…) The wound? It requires to identify, to inscribe, and to reiterate a certain malady, the wound becomes central.” Pane confessed at some point. In 1977, at Isy Brachot Gallery from Brussels, Gina Pane creates The Laura Action, probably one of the most controversial and electrifying action. Antonin Artaud, Colette Peignot, and Georges Bataille were her sources of reference. Starting with the ’80, when she decides to abandon the register of actions (being afraid of repeating herself), the series of installations, Partitions, revisits the photographic record of the previous actions, agglutinating the objects that the artist used as instruments. Rejecting the “feminist artist” label, Gina Pane resorted to her body as a means of exploring the creativity and as a sign of the impossibility of communicating with the others, the exterior.
