photo: Aurélien Mole
GALERIE FLORENCE LOEWY, PARIS, FRANCE
NOV 2019-JAN 2020
PRESS RELEASE: GARANCE CHABERT
SUPPORTED BY CNAP AIDE AUX GALERIES
THE TIME OF THE MOUNTAINS
- GARANCE CHABERT
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“The time of the mountains, the time of walking, the time of the camera and the time of the spectator intertwine, are superimposed and connected.” This thought, taken from the Summa IOS video, appears as programmatic in its approach to the landscape that Caroline Reveillaud adopts for this second solo exhibition at the Galerie Florence Loewy. The young artist is presented a new groups of works there in which photographs, sculptures and a video intersect and whose complementarity makes it possible to roam through the history of the landscape and how it is seen through visual associations and successive layers. Their common trajectory was born not long ago in 15th-century Italy, from the distance that the painters took to represent nature and constitute it in an aesthetic object, by “artialization” (Alain Roger, 1997). It is the thickness of this interiorized, persistent cultural prism, and defined by an eye toward which everything must converge, that Caroline Reveillaud probes in this exhibition.
Her founding work, a line of open books, spread out, on the floor, images of architectures and artworks organized under the items of “Object, Surface, Fold, Line, Sculpture 1.” The artist continues her personal inventory here of images and figures collected through readings and trips, and strides across the landscape looking for frames and lines in it, key supports of the illusionist perspective.
In the exhibition, the line is everywhere and takes different forms: a timeless fault of erosion in marble (Vedute) and granite (Map) rocks, it gaily winds in abstract figures sculpted on the wall (Curves), and furtively appears in the shots taken of the mountain ridges and undulations of water (Summa IOS). The exhibition’s title places it in the foreground, through an elementary visual formula created in the Renaissance: three straight, circular and serpentine lines (IOS) would make it possible to represent the real in all its movements (summa, everything).
This is the case for Curves, for example, which use abstract diagrams of physical phenomena and changes in state (movement of clouds, sublimation of gaseous bodies into solids, etc.) Extracts from scientific treatises, they escape the book to become small ornamental reliefs, and form a mysterious wall writing. We move easily in the exhibition from the second to the third dimension, the artist playing on the materiality of her images to multiply our glance in other directions.
This is true of Map, which presents the image of large altered granite blocks. The folded large-format printing support instantly brings to mind the road map, and leads us to a whole other mental perception of the network of lines: the schematized and macro scale of the landscape that is crossed, conveyed at high speed. In this collision, there is the image seen, but also the depth of the look and the projections of what we recall. The exhibition bathes in an Italian atmosphere, which resonates in the titles, the images and in our ears. Is it because art history was invented as a discipline in Italy and that it takes up a large part in the construction of the author’s approach? Vedute takes us to Carrara (Tuscany), through a series of photographs taken in the legendary quarries that since antiquity have supplied the marble blocks used in sumptuous residences and precious artworks. Today, the quarries are a place of interest and inspiration for many contemporary artists who celebrate its material and above all the fact that they are photogenic (Aglaia Konrad, Danh Vo, Batia Suter, Daniel G. Cramer, etc.). In this strongly “artialized” landscape, Caroline Reveillaud heightens her images through a smoked glass filter, itself partially incised via laser with intuitive lines extending those visible on the site. The coloring and thickness of the glass are obvious, via this screen that forces the eyes to adjust to two shots and disturbs the usual perception of the image: the cutouts give a physical density back to the original faults of the block of stone, which have become strokes, lines in the bi-dimensional image.
Summa IOS is a film that presents a series of sequences of landscapes crossed in Italy and elsewhere (mountains, hills, cliffs, coasts that alternate and make the viewer aware of the camera’s movements – focus, zoom, tracking shot, etc.). A woman’s voice, in voice-off, expresses thoughts on the historic construction of the landscape as an object of aesthetic emotion and a philosophical representation of the world. Written by the artist who nevertheless distances herself by having them read in Italian, the language of Zibaldone, Leopardi’s intellectual review whose form inspired her, her reflections are expressed with a fluidity and in a particularly controlled balance between writing and image. Permitting strong conversion points between the image and the text, while keeping them invincible in their own language is the film’s challenge and success. The eye and the mind can stroll through this film together or separately, reciprocally enlightening each other at certain moments and losing each other at others, in such a way that our own images and thoughts take over. “The landscape is inside,” she says, rich with interior images in knowledge unaware of itself that springs up in the recognition of an admired landscape. Caroline Reveillaud opens up this abyss to us.
Garance Chabert