Mon Bel Amour

So far, Frédéric Poincelet had remained a minutious chronicler of the intimate, somehow distant from the other authors published by Ego comme X, most likely because of a scarce production — after all, his official bibliography counts no more than seven books^[1] and a handful of pages scattered between 1998 and 2002. And since — nothing. Which made the release of this thick volume a definite surprise — and even better, a good one.

Let it be made clear right away, Mon bel amour is far from an easy read that reveals itself to any reader. It is difficult to talk about this story that is at once welcoming then evading, of those simple and unrelated situations that we feel confusely that they constitute the story of a relation — or many. So we perseverate, we dive back in, we read again, we turn back pages to check out who is who by examining the portraits featured at the begining of the book — eight portraits that most likely form couples, four couples forming and breaking up.
And little by little, the sixteen chapters — figuring as many scenes of fragile silence, moments of vulnerability or incommuncation captured on the page with the precision of a camera, with carefully tailored dialogues — those sixteen chapters end up, like a jigsaw puzzle, forming a story or stories, that we are left to assemble.
No need to spend time on Fréderic Poincelet’s choice of resorting to quotes from Gide’s Journal to open each chapter — this is without a doubt the only true affectation of this book, which does not need this august reference to express a deep sensitivity.

Frédéric Poincelet has been criticized for being affected in his art — here, the lines are precious and fragiles, at once spot-on while subtly erroneous, precise in the details and free in the outlines, leaving a (voluntary) awkwardness from which emerge approximative proportions.^[2]
What also strikes is this almost entomological approach, cold and detached, at odds with the emotions depicted. The pupil-less stares are strangely empty, attitudes are studied in their tiniest gestures, the sexual scenes explicit and almost violent in the representation of the bodies — bodies without a face, as if they were of no interest. To the point that we end up being tempted, at times, to avert our gaze, when this exploration of the intimate borders on voyeurism.

And if the situations included here are finally rather common,^[3] simply human and real — a love that begins or comes to an end, and variations on those themes — everything hangs on the narration, elegant and fragile like the art, which illuminates it all and makes it a precious work in more than one sense.