The shaman in the boudoir by Claude d'Anthenaise, curator nd director of Museum of Hunting and Nature, Paris
?Sheila Concari reign on an unusual herd, both audible and visual.
This is a pack that follows her in serried ranks and obeys. It hardly raises terror.
Those domestic wolves certainly do not tear the darkness of forests screaming death, nor scattering blood on dreams. Instead, they behave civilized beasts, merely whisper worldly comments. Politely arranged as wallpaper or hunged from the ceiling, these wolves seem to have a scent of nursery.
But to observe more closely, these human wolves - so human, too human - reveal another side of fantastic. This lupine company is however made only by and of males. This little world seems to invert the exclusively feminine one, which moves the unfortunate tale Red Riding Hood. Illuminated by a light, what shape could they project? It is not for me to offer a psychoanalytic reading of her work. Unlike many artists Sheila Concari does not use the excuse of youth trauma to justify her work. Somewhere, in a garden between Parma and Como, her childhood is closed. The viewer remains outside wondering what?s hidden behind these high walls. We do not know. But who cares!
Chanted, repeated, whispered, as an obscure ritual incantations, animated or inert images, words and sounds invade the space around. Derived from cloning or any genesis that ignores diversity, Sheila?s wolves seem destined to grow without limit. Her work follows a compulsive obsession. In a process akin to trance, her images wearisome to automatism, show something that remained foreign to consciousness. In a potion of a kind of naive witch, the artist combines the invocation of the mystery with the candor of her means of expression. In her work there is a side book lady, a sort of aesthetics of the precarious and unfinished, that she perfectly assumes. Recovered paper, wrinkled, glued, sewn. In her drawings as in her poems mixing languages and words with barbarous grace. But for Sheila magic does not exclude the sense of humor: invoking the spirits of nature, according to her multiple transformations, Sheila Concari invites the shaman into her boudoir.?
Future is beautiful by Véronique Baton, art historian
"Sheila Concari has not grown up with a pack of wolves but it is doubtful, both familiarity and understanding of the world lupine is deep. Constructing her works as imaginary stories she manages her matter through sound creations, films, drawings,
books, performances, all those single parts running as the elements of a personal mythology which intertwines troubling connections between the mythology
of animal and that of the artist. She plunges us straight into the depths of the unconscious and dreams, a secret world that involves memory and reminiscences of childhood. Small wolf headed characters inscriptions, voices appear in her films, as well as they disappear and resonate in the staircase where the film is projected.
It?s the flowing, motionless, constant and repetitive work of a memory quickly swept away by the tide. The scansion of images and sounds in the fragile vibrating light, leads to a fantasy world where childhood fears of an haunted night constantly resurface. These fabulous creatures small, between a men and a beast, populate the good luck tarot cards that the artist has placed in the bathroom lady at the Avignon Castle. Wolf, who?s always polite accompanied by Sheila, here becomes a guardian spirit or a magical mediator. He embodies the spirit of nature in a primary
and playful pleasant relationship.?