Caroline de Boissieu

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.