Didier Mahieu (1961) Anna Spiegelman Photography And Organic Material On Paper 200 X 150

The artist tells us that he worked on the same subject for more than eight years. He began with a mundane news item. What is not mundane, however, is that Anna disappeared in 1942 and that we know she was Jewish. Her story is lost in the terrifying history of the war years and their wave of deportations. Already at this point, we are swept along with the artist into a story where anything is possible, imaginable.

Didier Mahieu reconstructs a visual image of Anna based on an objective document describing her physical features. We could say that he draws a composite sketch of her while introducing an element of doubt. He draws with charcoal and graphite,

life-size or smaller, layers tracing paper over the image, submerges the drawing in water to blur it, and photographs it. He uses organic materials, including honey, which cause the image to evolve or gradually fade over time. He rephotographs and redraws after spreading paraffin, which makes the paper transparent, allowing the image to reappear. Hundreds of drawings, interventions, appropriations, and reappropriations.

The artist performs gestures, uses materials in a specific order, following rules whose meaning is known only to him. He becomes a priest.

He strives to remember an image that never existed, to draw so as not to forget, to create a story or to recreate History, to rediscover the form, the features of a face, and in doing so to preserve a trace—whether fleeting or detailed, sporadic or obsessive—of an existence or a moment in the past.

Didier Mahieu creates ritual through his repetitive, coded gestures and his transformative materials. He imbues his lines with powerful symbolism to bear witness through the image of this woman, to commemorate—through her tenuous story—the formidable history of the Holocaust, which she inevitably confronts.

The notion of disappearance and reappearance through the creative act takes on particular meaning here.

Date: probably around 2000–2005; this is a one-of-a-kind piece

Dimensions: 200 cm x 150 cm

* One-of-a-kind museum-quality piece

** Email confirming the artist’s authorship of the work prior to purchase. 

Frame: slightly damaged

Condition: superb in photos

On view at “Sablon Antiques Center,” 39, Place du Grand Sablon, 1000 Brussels

***I’ll take better photos soon....