Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition held at Malmö Konsthall in 2019, and curated by François Piron, Three Moral Tales examines the ways French artist Joëlle de la Casinière, Portuguese Ana Jotta and Flemish Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, use fables and sometimes caricatures to observe and criticize the cruelty of human relationships. The “moral tales” narrated by these three artists scrutinize representations of evil, and mock hierarchies, traditions and social order. By doing so, they also follow up on a certain spirit of the iconoclastic avant-gardes of the early 20th century. De la Casinière, Jotta and Van Kerckhoven have also in common to pay no fealty to trends of contemporary art. Moreover, they fought unwaveringly throughout their respective careers the need to see their work being given an “official line”. Instead, they stood aside, went underground or remained indifferent to the twists and turns of the art market and institutions. They sometimes created surrogate characters, hid, or playfully modified their names to react to the branding of identity in the artworld, and to the imposed marginalization that they had to cope with as women artists, as did artists living in peripheral geographies. In a way, paradoxically, being marginalized encouraged a calculated versatility of media and styles, and the invention of an idiosyncratic vocabulary, while total freedom remained their one and only rule.

(Three Moral Tales accompagne l’exposition des artistes Joëlle de La Casinière, Ana Jotta et Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven organisée par François Piron à la Konsthall de Malmö pour l’été 2019. La publication met l’accent sur un corpus spécifique de chaque artiste, qui n’a pas fait l’objet d’une documentation jusqu’à présent. Les Tablotins de La Casinière sont des poèmes-collages, entre le haïku et la miniature médiévale réalisés entre 1972 et 2014 au fil des déplacements et méditations de l’artiste qui les concevaient initialement comme des lettres à ses ami.e.s. La pratique de Van Kerckhoven s’accompagne fréquemment de textes, poèmes, déclarations et statements dont 24, rédigés entre 1979 et 2019, sont ici réunis. L’œuvre Ana et eu (Ana et moi), 2018 d’Ana Jotta est un vaste mobile constitué de vingt disques peints, associant des motifs abstraits et des fragments empruntés au comic de George Herriman, Krazy Kat, documentés en détail dans la publication.)