IN RESERVE

WITH AGNES GEOFFRAY, ISABELLE FERREIRA, SARA FAVRIAU, SYLVIE FANCHON, NATHALIE ELEMENTO, JONAS DELHAYE, JOACHIM BANDAU

To create from the absence: a little something that can change everything and become the backbone of the final work. This is what the artists reunited for this group show at Galerie Maubert propose. How the “reserved” work is revealed. How the addition (or even the accumulation) leads to a disappearance that progressively constructs the work.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Sylvie Fanchon follows a set of constraints previously fixed in order to both paint and draw patterns from a reservoir that are the result of language elements and an existing visual culture. She limits herself to the use of two colors per canvas, often applied flatly, nonstop questioning the relationship between the two-colored values. Since 2014, in the Tableaux-Scoths series or even the large murals in situ, the artist applies a first color then positions the adhesive tapes that invade the surface of the canvas before covering all of it with a new color. When removing the scotch, the patterns then appear in reserve. These compositions reveal the delicate superposition of the paintings’ skins, troubling the relationship between the background and the form, often playing with the positive/negative and with the recto/verso.

In Nathalie Elemento’s work, the stitch (applied on paper, fabric, wood and even lead) has progressively disappeared from her work: what stays, today, in store, are the dotted traces evoking the suspension (in particular of language) all while remaining a sign of continuity, of a relation. They bear witness of the potential fold and especially of the artist’s choice to fix the “state” of a sculpture. The “cardboard” boxes evoke notions of departure and movements (the relocation for example), but they contain, once set, the paradox of stability. The box induces the notion of interiority (the things and objects that inhabit us) along with posture possibilities, the folds or the different removals like emotion(s)’ re-transcriptions.

In a work between painting and sculpture, Isabelle Ferreira presents in this exhibition portraits of the L’invention du courage (O’Salto) series that evoke torn photos of Portuguese migrants fleeing Salazar’s dictatorship. These are frontal presences partly erased on the wooden surface or juxtaposed on color patches with torn forms. Their strength occurs with a gaze, a smile, an intention, that can both make us feel close and estranged.

This work by subtraction is quite natural for the sculptor: taking material from a marble or wooden block for example. Agnès Geoffray sculpts here, hollow, in the flat surface of the wall to reveal the white and wild roughness of the plaster that contrasts with the smooth and bright wall. As a negative matrix of an engraving that will not know drawing, Agnès Geoffray makes this sentence resonate: at the center of the weakness of the wall, this sentence is taken from and inspired by Roberto Zucco of Bernard-Marie Koltès: “I want to watch each blink of your eye, each breath on your chest, my ear attached to yours, I will watch your body”.

It is always interesting to linger over sculptors’ drawings. Joachim Bandau, for example, uses watercolor since the 1980s on large sheets of white paper, spreading multiple layers of light grey painting that, through their successive superpositions and juxtapositions, constitutes black or evanescent rectangular layers. He then operates a regression of the plan to the line (the delicate superposition of two flat surfaces creates the line) and a progression of the flat surface to the volume (through the models that appear and construct forms)..

“The viewer decodes the work backwards”, delivers the artist, evoking the composition of these paintings from a multitude of individual paintings (sometimes more than about forty layers), along with the fragile and liquid finish. “Each new surface is a response to the previous, positioned according to an intuitive arrangement in a temporal sequence. Sometimes I spend months, years on a work”. It is only the final gesture (the last layer) that delivers the final work, just like the last scotch that is removed in Sylvie Fanchon’s work.

Looking closely, the Black Watercolors, are not perfectly rectilinear, but present curved corners and manually traced lines that subtly twist. The superposition of watercolor layers is in the range of sculpture, like a mass raising from the void. The Black Watercolors fluctuate between penetration of light and reflection.

These are studies around the invasion and isolation. The continuity of the sculpture work around the bunkers, also places of refuge and deployment.

All in grey gradations, these watercolors evoke photographic decompositions of the movement, as if each of them was the capture of successive movements of one and the same block of color, moved by incessant coming and going of the opaquest zones to the most transparent ones. It is a duration saved on paper like the beginnings of cinema and chronophotography. The incursion in the yellow (2005-2006) is moreover quite intuitive for Joachim Bandau: the yellow is the excess of light, while the black evokes the absorption of light.

Finally, the relationship with photography is essential. Revealing the invisible, the non-accessible, this is what Jonas Delhaye proposes: the slide films of Etant donnée have been produced through the keyhole of a room of Château de Kerguéhennec. Only having access to the hallway thus transformed into a black room, Jonas Delhaye reveals the unknown interior of an inhabited room and its window overlooking the landscape. This work visually evokes the painting of Vermeer, conceptually, the founder voyeurism of Duchamp, and poetically the reverie of Bachelard: “The house looks through the keyhole” (La poétique de l’espace, 1975).

Gilles Clément explains us that a big catastrophe is sometimes at the origin of a renewal: when a fire wipes out a forest, centuries-old seeds can awake and that is how we were able to see disappeared species grow. Sara Favriau proposes us to sculpt starting from the disappearance. Saison noire n°2, is a series of twelve sculptured realized with burned wood: branches, gleaned in the garden of remarkable trees of the Harcourt Domaine, are carved out, sculpted then “cooked” in a collective fire. Paradoxically, the fire strengthens and sanitizes the wood, like the effect of a ceramic cooking. This second life and transformation of sculptures, question the durability of the work after destruction and its possible resurrection.