chronicle on artist work
Brigitte warned you: finding her workshop is not easy. The district is modern, dating from the 70’s. You have to leave the street and walk up a staircase to a terrace; if you see a dojo above the hardware shop Bricorama you are on track: the fact that warlike sculptures made of terra cotta, steel rods, bolts and cables, are…
Solberg’s Engravings are populated with prowling rodents, sharp-billed herons, snow-white stoats gnawing into the thickets – a whole wriggling world materializing the gestures of the engraver who cuts, rips, corrodes the metal. Solberg nibbles at her copper plate with the stubbornness of a shrew, her tools have the diligence of the tiny creatures scurrying around under the foliage. Here, the…
A seascape which prolongs the sea sprays of Monet: Mary Sallantin’s Aphrodite first bathes in painting, at her feet a patch of unpainted canvas underlining this contention. This Aphrodite, this Venus, this beauty is attired in truth, a nude emerging from the waves, embodies painting of the XXI century. Absolutely free to be who she is, taking on these shapes…
A Big Blue, a painting, whose long verticality physically grips the visitor: “story-within-a-story” to which Boris Lejeune invites to experience the viewer. But a pictorial “story-within-a-story”, very different from those that are cherished by the conceptualists: there is no paint exposing the wall color. Above a beach, at first glance fairly mundane, the eye is first attracted by the intensity…
The sea of our childhood was the lair of corsairs and pirates; fabulous cargoes, wrecked hulls spitting sheaves of diamonds, bunches of jewels; trunks of goldsmithery corroded by salt, gorged with enamel craft and sequins wriggling in the sunlight filtered by the coldness of water… Hélène Legrand shows the reality of the legend: the true treasure is the sea itself.…
The press has claimed that Pierre Lamalattie had inspired to Michel Houellebecq the hero of “La Carte et le Territoire” (“The Map and the territory”). For twenty years he was the accomplice of the writer, to the point that they published together the literary review Karamasov and the painter incarnated a mad artist in a film made by the future…
The Suite inexacte en homologie singulière (1968-2005) is a monster belonging to a race which was considered extinct: a 83 meter long drawing, made with Indian ink during forty years, which remained invisible since its first exhibition in 1971 in the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris. It is whispered that the work was developing in silence,…
Floating islands are well known, but Aude de Kerros has discovered the fulgurating island, carried by the floods like a marine comet. The island is a boat. The tree consists of a mast and its sails: the island is taking in the wind like a windward island sailing on towards dawn or sunset. Prophets and meditating mystics are aboard: as…
The gare Saint-Lazare: if you consider attentively this railroad hub, these locomotives, these express and omnibus trains, long-distance and local trains, resembles with its colored pipes, metal snakes whistling over our heads. The tracks are proliferating so densely that they hide the ground, they have almost obliterated all the greenery; and only some dwellings remain visible: how can trees, houses,…
In the title and in the painting itself, two things feel strange: that a painting could represent a notion of temporality; and a feeling of void. Is this the result of the disappearance of human characters? They are somewhere there – many of them, as evidenced by the cocktail glasses, but no one is visible on the canvas. The simplification…
