Thresholds
Series that follows on from Schmates. The bodies hesitate on the threshold to penetrate, retreat or fade away.
- Work on canvas with Indian ink, engraving ink and pigments.
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Suspended, heavy, sometimes animated by very slow waves which multiply the movement of the hanging bars, these sheets reflect in their weight, the gravity of the bodies they evoke.
The sculptural materiality of the previous works, architecture of iron, fabric and paper, gives way in this new series to a set of more economical works. If the body remains the essential and throbbing question, it presents itself as an uncertain presence on the threshold of disappearance. Traces and gestures take over from the material: they extend the echo from table to table like so many shadows cast. Doubles of this primary body which seem to remind us, as Clément Rosset writes, that "every painter has the fundamental mission of succeeding or missing his self-portrait (... in the absence of any attempt to appear himself on the canvas)".'" By their fundamental ambiguity, the previous works escaped the name of painting. They affirmed the presence of a body oscillating between structure and disintegration, labile scaffolding of floating sheet, fragile epidermis of paper revealing paradoxical entrails. Table and stele at the same time, the table reappears. The layers of paper mounted on the canvas are, here, integral with their support and gives it a new rigidity.
But, imperceptibly, the folds of the paper remind us of the affinities of the painting with the body. And it is the painting itself which becomes a body beyond all representation.
Thresolds
Suspended, heavy, sometimes animated by very slow waves which multiply the movement of the hanging bars, these sheets reflect in their weight, the gravity of the bodies they evoke.
Footprints, body negatives, trunks without legs, without arms, without head, almost without sex.
Body all the same, we recognize the torso, the attachment of a shoulder, the roundness of a hip. Evoking ancient embalming, burial in foreign lands, burials without a tomb, bodies without burial, blackened, burnt carcasses, the forms respond to each other from work to work, coming out of the sheets, by dint of overlays, or penetrating, turning with your back to the viewer, in a flat and flexible world, dark and pale, rough and soft.
shrouds without face, are they old dead, memory of the dead or alive, doubled, glued, torn, patched up, supported at the limit of a past and a present, a present and of a future?
Ravaudage, Catherine Ifergan.
Shadows "Fly in the ointment"
The sculptural materiality of the previous works, architecture of iron, fabric and paper, gives way in this new series to a set of more economical works. If the body remains the essential and throbbing question, it presents itself as an uncertain presence on the threshold of disappearance. Traces and gestures take over from the material: they extend the echo from table to table like so many shadows cast. Doubles of this primary body which seem to remind us, as Clément Rosset writes, that "every painter has the fundamental mission of succeeding or missing his self-portrait (... in the absence of any attempt to appear himself on the canvas)".'" By their fundamental ambiguity, the previous works escaped the name of painting. They affirmed the presence of a body oscillating between structure and disintegration, labile scaffolding of floating sheet, fragile epidermis of paper revealing paradoxical entrails. Table and stele at the same time, the table reappears. The layers of paper mounted on the canvas are, here, integral with their support and gives it a new rigidity.
But, imperceptibly, the folds of the paper remind us of the affinities of the painting with the body. And it is the painting itself which becomes a body beyond all representation.
The series then takes on its full meaning: it presupposes a search in movement that conjures and postpones the completion of the work. Each table carries with it the memory of all the tables in a thickness that is both depth and film surface.
Likewise, the color that appears in recent works is not a surface, but diffuse and underlying, it seems to emerge from the depths. Subtle incarnation offering itself to the eye through the leafing of the diaphanous papers.
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Thus, the movement which explores, like an archaeologist in front of a field of excavations, the various implications of this interrogation on the body reveals to us how precious a work is when it manages, as here, to emerge from the depths of images his own questioning.
'Schmates' photos, during the Memory Lane exhibition, Canton, July 2012.
'Schmates' photos, during the Memory Lane exhibition, Canton, July 2012.
