www.lacritique.org
French Painter. Inks and transparent effects.
Thursday, June 26, 2008 By Emmanuel Lincot, Specialist in contemporary Chinese art
“Le monde est une branloire pérenne; je ne peins pas l’être mais le passage.”
This aphorism by Michel de Montaigne comes to mind while contemplating the work painted by Caroline de Boissieu. With black and white: this painting summons visions and hallucinations, calls forth ghosts, those passers of time that permit bereavement, departure, and the dead-end of depression. In this, Caroline de Boissieu has brought herself into the filiation of great artists.
To look at each of her images is to try and decipher the presence of an absence within the visible.
Technically, her work eliminates the contours. Water, ink, pastels, and Plexiglas are her materials of choice. Her important work guides her viewers towards cultural and emotional horizons reminiscent of Chinese art with a diverse empathy.
…looking at the work of Caroline de Boissieu, I cannot resist thinking of the artistry of stained glass.
And what do we perceive in this intermediary space of art? This “inter-dit” that unfolds the artist? The frail silhouette of a child; recurrent signs of a fear that produces a stop, a suspense in imaging…
Is it not this fear that Caroline de Boissieu conveys in her work, in her portrayal of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001? In other words, Caroline de Boissieu maintains not so much a connection with history itself, as with the memories. She reveals to us sensory snippets, a mosaic made of instantaneous images that follow one another to make the image, a temporality exquisite and fleeting specific specific to what touches the artists emotions.
Alain Sarafati – Architecte February 2008
It begins with a shock of percussion. The emotion is simply present; the magic operates without knowing why. The diverse ambiguity of forms is luminous. We can see, in the rich and complex work of Caroline de Boissieu, the presence between air and water, between opacity and transparency; these tensions are understood and conveyed.
At first in the paintings of Caroline de Boissieu, it is the amplitude of action that influences us and envelops us in its folds, its layers, and its rolls. She does not leave time to reflect or analyze. Straightaway, one is taken in by the movement, by a lightness whose profoundness never ends. This is the force behind her work: her capacity to paint the surface of things while engaging us in the abysses beyond. It provokes the desire to know more, to go beyond the surface, and to not simply accept what one first perceives.
The complexity of the process, the force that one sees in each painting by de Boissieu, is taken from the paper. This stratification, or better, sedimentation that one talks about like a simple scratching of parchment is, in her hands, an unending elaboration that takes away any will to disturb the moment imprisoned between photograph, acrylic, pencil, and pastel. All these techniques are brought together to give the project the full depth of its expression, its life force. It is because of this life force that de Boissieu’s influence has spread to East Asia. The energies of the elements in her paintings compete deliberately; they hide and imprison their secrets.
I like this beautiful and unbearable art, and the way this radical poet slowly unfolds her craft, showing its transparency and opacity, mobility and immobility, happiness and pain. These tensions are powerful in between shadow and light, in between the sky and the ocean. The Plexiglas will only wait for one thing: the opacity of time that will finally break down its hold between hope and despair, no…the hope will prevail.
“Coté Ouest” January 2005
In the search for moments lost to time
…Someone purifies and exhibits their delicate solitude through colors, emotions, and instants.
These are the slender silhouettes that walk alone.
The sketch of a child picking up a seashell, a wave that roars and crashes on a beach somewhere, these simple instants fixed to the canvas…Caroline de Boissieu pursues these lost moments, nothing else; regardless of whether or not her work evokes the seaside of Boudin with fugitive silhouettes, the artist is affixed in her own universe.
She uses photography as a preliminary material, a piece of clay that she fashions and purifies until only the essential remains, an important pose or a stolen gesture. More precisely, she scratches layers off of printed photographs to take away the actual image.
The group is traced on Plexiglas, which accentuates the transparence of the game of matter. Plastician and Painter of the time, Caroline nimbly created with this playful technique some poetic compositions. The painting brings out a slightly abstract, dream-like side in these landscapes and real-life situations. The first actor, the water, interferes, expands upon or completely invades the canvas. Equally omnipresent, the white that the artist favors in her clouds, almost transparent on top of its photographic support obliges the artist to rework it on tracing paper like a luminous train to underline certain scenes.
With a touch of impressionism, Caroline describes memories. In the wake of her characters’ approaching steps, our own lives…Her success confirms her artistic command.
Agnès BENOIT
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