Dolls dismembered, decapitated, disarticulated, imprisoned in wooden cages or packed in closed bags, faces with empty eyes whose violence contrasts with the softness of the colors… Monique Gies painted these paintings between 1977 and 1978, the year in which She slammed the door to her marital home, leaving behind a husband and four children between the ages of 11 and 18.
Raised in Alsace in a very conformist Catholic environment, this daycare director was 43 years old when she abandoned the bourgeois comfort of a life corseted by respect for conventions overnight for a 9 square meter room in Paris. “It was flight or asylum” she would say later. For a year, at the same time that she began psychoanalysis, she painted one hundred small canvases that she hung on her walls, without her children ever visiting her, questioning her about those dismembered dolls, with their legs spread, about those decapitated heads. that lie on the ground. But what to say to this extraordinary mother, voluntarily provocative, unpredictable and often brutal?
In February 1979, some of her paintings were presented for the first time during the exhibition of women artists organized at the Ediciones Stock facilities by the feminist magazine. witches, created by the academic and writer Xavière Gauthier and in which Monique Gies participates. Forty-five years later, from October 5 to November 2, a hundred paintings, those he painted between 1977 and 1978, will be exhibited at the Christophe Gaillard gallery in Paris (3my). This time Monique Gies will not attend. He died at the dawn of his 88th birthday, in March 2022.
“And what did he do to you?” »
A few months earlier, on a Sunday at the beginning of 2021, the family met for lunch in the Ground Control room, a former SNCF warehouse converted into a cultural center, on 12my district of Paris, where food trucks introduce you to the cuisines of the world. Around the table we discussed Camille Kouchner’s book, the big family, which has just been published in Le Seuil and in which the author reveals the incest perpetrated against her brother by her father-in-law, the constitutionalist Olivier Duhamel.
Suddenly Monique Gies intervenes: “I was also raped when I was little. » Her daughter, Marie-Christine Frison, a stylist, is amazed: “This is the first time I’ve heard that!” » “But finally everyone knows! “, —his mother responds dryly. Accustomed to both maternal bravado and her peremptory tone, her daughter insists, asking for details. The octogenarian alleges incest in his maternal family, gives the name of his attacker and specifies: “It came back to me in the analysis. » “And what did he do to you?” Did he put his little finger in your navel? “, jokes one of the guests. End of exchange. Monique Gies returns to silence, as do her children.
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