Sabine Darrigan nous emporte vers un ailleurs fantasmé. A la rencontre de l’autre, ses sculptures incarnent la richesse, le raffinement et la complexité des cultures humaines. Empreintes de spiritualité, elles nous transportent aux confins du mystère et incitent à l’éveil de nos sens, troublés par tant de beauté. Car elle invente, à la croisée des chemins, entre Orient et Occident, Inde et Asie, des figures d’ailleurs rêvées, à l’aura solaire, opulentes et parées de somptueux atours glanés au gré de ses expéditions parisiennes, témoins de son raffinement extrême et de ses curiosités. Tissus rares, perles anciennes, métaux précieux, autant de matériaux riches ou modestes qui une fois assemblés par ces mains savantes subliment le réel et invitent au rêve… à la rencontre de la beauté d’autrui, de ces figures parées telles des divinités, des êtres vénérés… Convoquer ainsi le beau au cœur du réel, recréer la magie des mille et une nuits d’Orient, l’opulence des divinités indiennes empruntes de mysticisme…tel est le geste de l’artiste pour éveiller les consciences. Un appel à la conscience de la beauté de l’ailleurs et de l’autre, à la richesse de la rencontre des diversités culturelles et de leur légitimité. Au respect de la différence, à la rencontre des spiritualités.

Sabine Darrigan est née dans les Landes en 1924, dernière d’une fratrie de cinq enfants. Elle perdra sa mère à 5 ans et son père à l’âge de 14 ans.
Sa petite enfance s’écoule entre Paris et les Landes jusqu’aux années 1930 où son père s’installe à Alger. Retours successifs chez ses grands-parents entrecoupés de saisons à Vittel.
Au décès de son père, Sabine Darrigan est recueillie à Varsovie par son oncle diplomate : l’année de ses quinze ans, très riche en souvenirs, est malheureusement interrompue par la déclaration de guerre de 1939.
Retour précipité à Paris, études secondaires à la Tour. Sabine Darrigan ne passe pas son bac et prépare le Monitorat d’enseignement ménager à Chartres chez les Religieuses de St Paul jusqu’à ses 21 ans. Elle exerce alors dans un cours privé à Compiègne pendant cinq ans. Elle crée un cours où ses élèves apprennent à fabriquer des marionnettes.
En 1950, Sabine Darrigan décide de vivre sa vie, part au Danemark et rencontre, par des circonstances inattendues la reine Frederika qui lui demande de donner des leçons de français à la princesse Margaret. En parallèle, elle donne des cours du soir à l’Ecole Berlitz.
Autorisée par la Reine, Sabine Darrigan suit une formation de modéliste dans les ateliers de Vangh, le Dior du Copenhague de l’époque.
Le hasard lui fait rencontrer Fru Anderson qui lui demande de créer sa collection de chapeaux. Sabine Darrigan accepte. Par miracle, les chapeaux créés dans le vif se vendent.
Un an après Sabine Darrigan rentre à Paris et s’installe sous les toits pour créer ses propres modèles au 3 rue de la Renaissance, au pied de Jean Barthé. Elle crée des modèles pour des « dîners de tête » et fait, en parallèle, les étalages de Rose de Picardie, Avenue George V, où elle dépose ses masques. Sabine Darrigan est remarquée par Denise Leblond, journaliste à Marie-France qui lui consacre un article et lui commandes 3 créations originales. Puis Sabine Darrigan confie des masques à Dominique Baumelle pour une vitrine Hermès à Noel en 1955.
En 1956, elle rencontre le poète Gérard Mourgue qui la fait exposer aux côtés de Jean Cocteau à la Galerie de l’Opéra en 1957.
Depuis 1989, Sabine Darrigan ne cesse de créer tout en participant, par intervalles, à plusieurs expositions.

Expositions personnelles :

2015            Outsider Art Fair Paris, Galerie Claire Corcia.
                     Figures d’ailleurs, Mairie du 8e arrondissement, Paris.
2010            Galerie Treize, Rennes.
2000            Galerie Lina Davidov, Paris
1997            Galerie Treize, Rennes
1996            Galerie Suzelle Berna, Paris
1992            Galerie « A l’Arcade Colette », Paris
1990            Galerie l’Ecluse, Paris

Expositions de groupe: 

1989            Galerie l’Ecluse, Paris
1957            Galerie de l’Opéra, Paris, exposition avec Jean Cocteau.

Films :

Emissions réalisées en 1990 par Antenne 2 et par FR3
Films de Karine Zibaut : « Les 77 » et « Haut les masques », 2015.

THE SECRET LIFE OF OBJECTS :
THE ART OF SABINE DARRIGAN
    
Text by Kate Jenkins, 2015

“Walking into Sabine Darrigan’s studio is like crossing the threshold into another world.  In anthropology it’s called a liminal experience, this crossover from the everyday—in this case the streets of the Trocadero district of Paris—into a world where time stops and you encounter the timeless world of the Other, of gods, demons, of what many would call the Sacred.
         Sabine would call it the world of silence.
         Inside the light is dim, the room swathed in fabric of a deep red hue.  Here and there candles flicker and as your eyes adjust to the darkness you become aware that you are being watched by a hundred eyes.  On the walls, strange masks stare out at you, eerie, primitive, both menacing and beautiful.  Elsewhere an army of almost life-sized figures, deeply mysterious, seem to be halted in momentary abeyance, as though at any moment they could resume their march toward the unknown.  Their clothing is tribal, vibrant, sparkling with beads, sequins, mother of pearl, festooned with feathers, their faces veiled.  You feel that you have stumbled into a secret ceremony, some ritual from the deep past of the exotic cultures of the world—Africa, the Middle East, the Americas before Columbus.
         You make a tentative move toward the figures and suddenly something catches your eye which startles : could this face, which looks at you so impassively, actually be a purse?  Move closer and you can identify an elegant evening clutch from the Art Deco period.  Its hair once might have been a feather boa, its eyes once did service as buttons of gleaming nacre. Closer still, you realize that the fabrics swathing these mysterious figures are the finest silks. Slowly you begin to realize that these are beings which have been created not by tribal craftsmen but by a brilliant artist working with the most sophisticated materials which Paris has to offer.
         In the center of the room, resting on a kilim-covered divan, is the magicienne who has brought this amazing array of creatures into being.
         Sabine Darrigan is tiny, totally elegant and, at ninety, beautiful.  Her carriage is exquisite, her nose patrician. She wears a splendidly-cut black jacket and exudes the sort of intrinsic chic that seems to be the natural heritage of French women.
         She is also driven.
         “I must create. I am driven to do it,” her words rush out in a torrent when she describes her work. Obeying a compulsion that she herself scarcely understands, she spends her days feverishly bringing each figure into being. The work is painstaking and masterful, relying on techniques learned in another life, at another studio, a studio which was firmly ebedded not in the world of art but in the world of fashion.
         She was born into a prosperous Basque family in the Landes District of France and grew up there and in Paris, where her father was a banker, later living with her father for a time in Algeria. Orphaned while she was still in her teens, she was dispatched by an uncle to learn home economics with the nuns of St. Paul in Chartres, having earlier failed to earn her baccalaureat. Upon graduating she taught in a college for girls, creating a course in which she taught her pupils to make marionettes. Her career followed a curious trajectory, taking her to Denmark where an introduction to Queen Frederika led to her teaching French to the Princess Margaret. While instructing the princess she simultaneously did a designer training course with the Copenhagen couture house, Vangh and emerged as a designer of hats.
         When she returned to Paris a year later, she set up her own atelier. She began designing “dinner hats” which soon attracted a following among the fashionable women of Paris. Even as she was becoming a successful designer of hats, her career as an artist was already beginning to evolve.   
The first public showing of her art came about almost by accident, when a friend asked her to design a Christmas window for Hermes in 1955.  Two years later her masks were on exhibit at the prestigious Galerie de l’Opera alongside Jean Cocteau.
Where does it come from, this magic alchemy which transforms couturier silks and flea market treasures into exotic beings which seem to come from the realm of the supernatural?  For Sabine, it comes from the materials themselves. Like Michelangelo, who believed that each piece of marble he worked contained a figure waiting to be born, Sabine came to feel that the materials of her work as a milliner—the fabrics and feathers, the ribbons and beads—had secret lives of their own, that they, too, were waiting to be transformed into works of art through the medium of her own skillful hands.  
Her works have been called “automatic sculptures,” hearkening back to the surrealists whose aim was to create works of art directly from the subconscious, without resorting to conscious thought.  Working with no preconceived idea of what she wishes to achieve, she allows  her  silks and embroideries, jet necklaces and beaded purses, fringes and feathers, to choose each other, to leave their “world of silence” and, through the conduit of her artistry, to be made manifest as “faces strange and secret”, beings which seem almost alive…  
Objects of profound mystery which intrigue and entice with promises of supernatural wisdom, the sculptures of Sabine Darrigan stand parallel to the sacred figures of the world’s exotic places, from Africa to Afghanistan, Bukhara or Bali.  Like these, they seem to have been born from the depths of the collective unconscious of humanity itself.  And like them they reveal the universal human subtext which underlies all our differences and which now, more than ever, we ignore at our own peril.”