ENSBA, PARIS, FRANCE
DNSEP BEAUX ARTS DE PARIS
JUN 2016
FOCUS on the installation of Caroline Reveillaud presented from 30 June to 2 July 2016 on the occasion of the open doors of École des Beaux-Arts de Paris - EMMANUELLE ODDO
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A student at the Beaux Art in Paris, Caroline Reveillaud presents during the open doors of the Beaux-Arts her photographic installations, each based on the same starting point: a corpus of images methodically gathered in her work Object, surface, line, fold, sculpture. His work was nominated for the Prix des Amis des Beautiful Arts. Fascinated by books and architecture, Caroline Reveillaud succeeds through her works to mutate one another: the photographed architectural environment is collected, dissected, classified according to the criteria that gave the edition its title. The book is made of sculpture, erected as a foundation, the foundation of our societies, our ways of thinking, our ways of being. This book, which contains no less than 300 photos of urban landscapes made between 2010 and 2015, serves as the basis for Caroline's various works. Sometimes taken in its entirety, sometimes truncated or multiplied, it allows it to recycle its images, manipulate them, and rebroadcast them in ever-new forms. Thus, despite its reproducible nature, the work displays a certain singularity in each of its representations.
This is evidenced by his work Ligne, created in 2016, which brings together 30 identical examples of Object, surface, line, fold, sculpture, end-to-end under a glass 4 meters long. Each edition overlaps the next, and each is open to a different page, then deploying together a dark, rigorous and harmonious line of photographs. The sobriety of black and white, the geometry of the lines could link the work to the minimalist current, if, at each end, the artist had not taken care to let a free page run, prolonging the movement, taking the sculpture to horizons other than its formal frame, delimited by this glass plate.
For here, the book is intended to be alive, filled with a generating force. Under the window, the wavy pages and swell. The movement that takes place is similar to that of a wave, a breath, a respiration. He opposes the apparent linearity of the work and its frozen character. But let us not stay there. In the face of Caroline’s works, we must not hesitate to come closer. The blurring of the photographs will then be noted. This visual disturbance forces the viewer to guess the original shapes, to go through this line that takes place like a narrative, of which each photograph would become a character. Leaning on this glass slide, in the manner of a scientist who deciphers his microscope, he acquires an active observer role, reconnecting with the receptive attitude induced by the book and necessary for its transmission function. The exhibition of the open doors des Beaux Arts shows two other works by Caroline Reveillaud. Pagework still dissects the book Object, surface, line, fold, sculpture, vault key of all the works, with its plexiglass plate that blurs parts of the image. Next door, Column intensifies the link between the book and the architecture, between the content and the container. This is reflected in the title of sculpture, which refers to the vocabulary of both. Free A4 sheets of paper are stacked one on top of the other, then connected in such a way that they are freed from their febrile and flexible nature to acquire a clean, solid materiality that is imposed in space as a true architectural element. On the slices of each sheet are silkscreened photographs from Object, surface, line, fold, sculpture, continuing the path of the work in the exhibition space, and replaying the idea of the book as a support for our societies, symbolized here by the shots of multiple urban or peri-urban landscapes. A true vault key of Caroline's work, Object, surface, pli, ligne, sculpture is no longer to be regarded as an object that is being manipulated, that we hold, but as a force that is imposed on us, that unfolds in space while testifying to the correspondences between what it contains and the space in which our bodies evolve.
Emmanuelle Oddo
photo: Pierre Seiter