OFLUXO

Jenna Kaës. Conjuring up absence.
Ludwig, Otto, Frederick, William. All these names were given to the future Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886) at birth, as if all the great kings and emperors of the Middle Ages had been invited to look into his cradle. But Ludwig II was born in the middle of the 19th century: Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793, Otto I of Greece was overthrown in 1862, and Bavaria had to join the new German Empire of the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty in 1871, whose members were usually named Frederick and William. Ludwig II spent his first summers in the neo- Gothic castle of Hohenschwangau, the “paradise of his childhood”, where he was transported to the fairy-tale Middle Ages of German Romanticism, dreaming in front of Moritz von Schwind’s frescoes depicting the quest for the Grail and the legend of Lohengrin. But the “only true king” of the 19th century, according to Verlaine, was not made for constitutional monarchy, the industrial revolution or Bismarckian realpolitik, and his death as a Shakespearean hero in a lake made him a romantic icon. Failing to truly govern, he endeavoured, with his architects and artists, to revive or give birth to a world that was at once bygone, abolished and fantastical, building refuges against the ugliness and brutality of the world.

This desire to conjure up absence, of time as well as of matter, runs through Jenna Kaës’ work, which could be the dreamy decor of an imaginary castle of Ludwig II of Bavaria, like an invitation to sit at the acidulous table of the Fisher King or at the banquet of Valhalla. Reliquaries without relics, her objects together constitute a medieval treasure, which by their grouping, their arrangement, their play of materials and forms, make absence present, and in turn become relics. The luminous flashes that run through them and are reflected in an ephemeral manner, without it being clear whether they are playing with the light or whether it is the light that is playing with them, blur the border between the real and the unreal, the material and the immaterial, between the object and its ethereal double.

Her chalices, both metallic and alive, are like a Grail from which the blood has been withdrawn, metamorphosing it by its departure, merging the eternal and the ephemeral in a paradoxical union. Her candlesticks, veritable monuments to lost time, solidify the passage of hours measured by burnt out candles, transformed into lost wax, definitively melted, only to be resurrected with the solid shine of metal. Gloucester’s Romanesque candlestick featured the struggle between good and evil, silence and speech, shadow and light: Jenna Kaës’ candlesticks share her stalagmitic forms, but they situate them in a kind of primordial chaos, Beyond Good and Evil. The passing and returning of time, depositing and withdrawing its sediments in the random ebb and flow of time, can also be seen in these ghostly tapestries, stained with foggy memories of distant hunts in Arcadian forests. The beads from which the spider webs that cover them are made, at once disquieting and childlike, come straight out of an old workshop for making funeral wreaths: these small pieces of glass have finally retained the function they originally had in cemeteries, where they framed the now half-faded photographs of the deceased. They try to ward off, in an ephemeral and consciously illusory way, the inexorable passage of time and the ineluctable absence that follows.

— Raphaël Bories