Marie Chênel
Text published by the art center in the form of a brochure, sent by post.
"We'd never let a line dream before."
Dear Estèla,
Slightly elsewhere, I've just hung up. Your residency in Valenciennes is coming to an end, and you've been here for almost four months, with two studios and an apartment in the art center's own courtyard, a former carpenter's workshop. In this period suspended between two years, you're on your own, but that's not something you don't like. It preserves that capacity for concentration you're gifted with, a full absorption in the making, the raw material and the thoughts that swirl around it. The sky is gray, the cold present; from the studio where you call me, you can see the building that houses the exhibition space and guess your works, those you have created in this precise place, in dialogue with it.
Our appointment is by telephone, and we have tacitly refrained from using the online tools that have cannibalized our lives in recent months. Beforehand, you took care to send me several views. I scroll them across the screen, accompanying your story. It's a paradoxical experience, the discovery "in absence" of works that need to be grasped by the body, in its entirety. You speak to me of thresholds and limits, of the need you have imposed on visitors to enter, leave and enter again; of the impossibility of surveying the space in a single continuous movement. Without formulating it, I'm reminded of the railway-inspired injunction that was the intriguing working title of Luis Buñuel's first film: Il est interdit de se pencher au-dedans. A free, immediate association that I experience as a call to displacement. I think you're aiming for exactly the opposite, by provoking discontinuity; that we allow ourselves to "lean in", our gaze made curious.
Here, you first saw the floor, its various concrete materials, its surface marked by the stigmata of time and past activities. Giving the illusion of an engraved architect's plan, relatively straight lines formed a network. You deciphered them as if they were writing, and there was a typology to be established. Some were the ghostly imprint of vanished facilities - you knew they were an office and storage areas. These light, plaster-tiled constructions themselves partly followed the course of wooden expansion joints, laid out when the slab was poured. In other places, however, it was precisely because of the lack of joints that surprisingly linear cracks appeared. Whether man-made or accidental, you've drawn the following conclusion: all these lines correspond to movements in the ground, whether anticipated or actual.
To be precise, I've been reading a must in art studies. In his Brief History of Lines, anthropologist Tim Ingold also sees lines everywhere. So much so, in fact, that he sets out to disentangle them into large families: there are threads, traces, and a third category "created(...) by ruptures that form within surfaces themselves. These are cuts, cracks and folds. Cracks result, more concretely, "from the fracture of fragile surfaces caused by pressure, collusion, or wear." While learning about expansion joints, whose function is to accompany the pressures exerted by concrete as it expands and contracts in response to various factors, you came across an expression that gave your exhibition its title, Mécanique des résistances. This double effect, between restraint and thrust, interested you all the more as a similar movement runs through the whole of your practice, whose fixity is only apparent. It's a restrained tension, never detached from a physical relationship with the materials: so, while the body may appear to be in the background, it's never absent. Yours first, which gives the measure of all creation, inflects the weight and dimensions of the elements: the upper limits are those of what you can apprehend, lift. Then the visitor's, through his or her movements, which we discussed from the outset, appreciating the proportions and significant placements of your works.
For your central installation, you wanted to "emphasize" these lines that allow the screed to "breathe", by laying around sixty 50 cm-high plaster tiles along their course. Don't be fooled by the fact that you're using prefabricated materials, in reference to past projects: the construction gesture is consistent and the finishing touches are, as always, extremely precise. You sanded the tiles to a fine grain, lightening them and making them more porous and matte at the same time. The shades are faithful to the color range of your work, in keeping with your favorite materials (plaster, concrete, wood, ceramics). Cracks are followed to the millimetre, including false joints. Five other, smaller pieces have been "placed" in the cut-out space, punctuating it. All are new. And yet, as if in a passionate discussion, each one refers me back to your previous works, to the desire to consider their conceptual and aesthetic similarities and differences; they form a family, a clear sign that you are digging deeper into the issues of a rich, singular and coherent approach.
This medium plate, which was "waiting" against a wall outside your Paris studio, in the same balanced position as the one you've given it here, has been exposed to the elements. Its surface is colored, as is its density: it appears "charged". Like the main installation, it embodies your approach to the object, "by no means as an end in itself, but simply as a way of recording and formally materializing events that are, most of the time, of the imperceptible order. Two works are designed to resonate with the windows and the sky beyond. On the one hand, the sandblasted glass panel on the floor, which almost reflexively prompts us to look up at the window it is close to. On the other, this acrylic painting on medium, an explosive technique in your practice. Hanging opposite another bay, its abstraction nevertheless seems familiar. In fact, it echoes the qualities of your aesthetic, "which can lead to saying the most by showing the least. Based on the composition of panels leaning against the wall of your studio, it invites us to perceive the sculptural in the pictorial. The last two works to be shown at Valenciennes are made from castings, and take us to the edge of things. First, there's this plaster cast of a corner angle with a central fold resulting from its transport, and then this three-part work, playing on invisibility, concrete linings for unsealed paving stones used as wedges. You were attentive to the usual placement of these stones, one curiously located on the roof, as well as to the history of their movements, from the city ramparts to the paved courtyard of the art center. Place as raw material, and the elusive movement that animates it.
Since I began this letter with the question of absence, I'd like to conclude by affirming the "full and significant presence" of your works, following in the footsteps of the great names of American Minimalism. In fact, as I write to you, I keep dreaming of Robert Morris's Peruvian experience, standing "in the line" of the Nazca geoglyphs, "literally, from his toes to his eyes".
Marie Chênel
December 30th, 2020