A thousand and one leaves / Céleste Gangolphe

Rue des Capucins, 40 - 7000 Mons

Céleste Gangolphe recently moved to Brussels, after a career spent in Paris working for the newspaper L'Express. She now specialises in drawing, painting and creating murals. Céleste Gangolphe oscillates between different graphic styles, which allows her to freely adapt her compositions to to suit the specific nature of the project. Most often, she creates giants, sometimes androgynous, to whom she assigns gentle, inspiring postures. Passionate about patterns, Gangolphe works with textures and materials, incorporating textile prints, wallpaper and mosaics into her work. She uses drawing, painting and collage to create fragile, sensitive images that can find a place in the public space. For her, it's always a question of adapting to a place and the people who live there, while trying to create a universe that engages and tells a story. Clearly, she likes to set up street scenes and place imaginary characters, often half-man half-woman, wearing colourful patterns reminiscent of textile prints and wallpaper.

Here, in the middle of the city, is a fresco of plants invading the front wall. Mons is a mineral city, so any addition of vegetation is visually very striking in the course of this street, which links the station to the pedestrian street. Céleste Gangolphe pays tribute here to the men and children of the Doudou leaves.

Some of these characters are buried in the rhizomatous ivy that gradually clings to the cracks in the bricks of the wall. In addition to the magnificent work of texture and material that develops in shades of green on the façade, the artist has also managed to integrate into this camouflage keys to interpretation that only a sharp, informed eye can decode. For the artist, this fresco addresses the relationship between Man and Nature that is omnipresent in the fight known as the Lumeçon.

In addition to this essential relationship between the Savage and the Civilised in the ducasse, another important theme runs through this fresco, that of filiation, which has ensured the transmission of this myth for generations and generations.

Over the years, the children's cuddly toy, played a week after the adults', has become an essential and decisive key moment in the recognition of this living heritage, adapted to our modern society.

Also known as the Wild Men, the Leaf Men support and guard the dragon's tail. There are eight of them. They literally pull it out of the audience with each stroke of the tail. They are dressed in green jackets and trousers covered with around 1,500 to 2,000 ivy leaves.

They are hand-sewn in black thread on the days leading up to the Ducasse. The Men and Children of Leaves are covered with a long conical hat that falls behind the head and is also covered in leaves. Their shirts are as red as the lapels of their jackets, and their ties are yellow. Their green clubs with red pimples complete their appearance, giving them Nature's attributes of strength and power, which diminish as they fight. As they are stripped off, the jackets reveal an original drawing of a club on a leaf, on the breast pocket and on the back.

L'art habite la Ville