Cassiopée: Let the little papers speak by EMILIE BITAULD
An exhibit by Emilie Bitauld from September 15th to October 6th 2017 Cassiopée
Between 2016 and 2017, painter Emilie Bitauld participated in several artist-in-production programs located in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. These three countries inspired the small formats featured in the exhibit. Though every piece is created on a paper base, the artist uses a variety of techniques: oil paint, pastel, primitive pigments, acrylic paint, watercolor or fluid pigment juices that macerate for several days. In the exhibit Let the little papers speak (title of a famous french old song by Régine), three main themes are presented as an invitation to lightness: the powdery nebulae found in Petits papiers (small papers), the magical floating stones found in Gems and the playfulness found in trails from the series To ski the sky.
As lightness sometimes goes hand in hand with diversity, other series complete this constellation-exhibit:
Sapiosexual is a cosmic allegory representing the results of a devote Mormon's MRI gathered in the context of a study carried out by the University of Utah. Said study revealed that drugs, sex and gambling generated the same neural response as religious sentiment.
In each case, the cerebral zones activated are related to the neural structure called the reward circuit, a common characteristic of mammals that ensures survival by making us know where we are. (Source: Social neuroscience journal).
Blue sky is a poetic experience inspired by the artist's month-long residence in a beautiful Swiss ski station. I don’t wanna fall is the development of an art-rock attitude that aims to prolong and delight in the state one finds oneself in when falling in love, while avoiding to succumb entirely to the feeling. Bamboo displays Asian and vegetal influences.
Pétillance (sparkle) encourages meditation, a flash of Zen if yoga class was too early this morning. Suspended in mid-water, Fishes transcends the frontier between abstract and figurative art. Besides, do we not come from the bottom of the ocean, itself the final frontier of our irrepressible compulsion to explore? Where will we stop and what is left to explore, other than the depths of our own humanity? An incitement to travel that, for a brief moment, abolishes space.
Biography by Kristell Henry
Émilie Bitauld was born on June 7, 1979 in Brittany, France. She currently lives and works in Paris.
She worked for several years as an international development expert and cultural project engineer at the Ministries of Culture and Education of France and Burkina-Faso, and later devoted herself to research work in the same area. She lectures in Europe, and represents France at the General Assembly of UNESCO in the field of Intangible Heritage. Émilie worked as a project manager in management and communication until 2010, year in which she decided to devote herself fully to an artistic career previously inaugurated between 1995 and 2001, during her studies of Fine Arts at the Sorbonne and at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
He devoted himself mainly to painting, and developed in parallel a photographic and sculptural practice. At the core of his creation is a fascination for telluric and cosmic forces. His work, mainly abstract, explores diverse themes, ranging from the evocation of meteorological phenomena to the representation of vegetal elements, passing through the movements of the stars (Big Bang). Like poets, Émilie Bitauld appropriates and understands the manifestations of the nature that surrounds her and of which she is a part: lightning and stars, mist and coral, birds and storms become the main components of her painting palette.
The artist knows how to cultivate through her work a tension between a certain lightness reminiscent of Japanese haiku (Gems) and a strong statement that translates her convictions and social commitments (Invisible). An apparent spontaneity of gesture is quickly belied by an extremely complex technical process and a very meticulous finish (Petits papiers). Her works are often the result of innumerable processes of sanding, scraping and coating, not to mention the actual manufacture of paints through mixtures of macerated juices and pigments.
Émilie Bitauld established her main workshop in the Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre in 2012. She has benefited from several artistic residencies and temporary workshops, in Annecy, Saint-Leu (La Réunion), Nice, Troyes, La Rochelle, Brittany and Switzerland. Since 2013, his work has been the subject of exhibitions in France and abroad.
Big Bang, Kristell Henry 2017
Big Bang BY Jeremy D. Collot-Rosoux
It is as a field of experimentation how the artist invests painting, in the broad sense; its materiality, its modes of appearance, of presentation, the support, the canvas, the surface, the colored field... To deconstruct the gesture, to put in question the limits of a practice, to enrich it of new techniques... It is by passing from one experimentation to another that the artist structures a thought and a rich and complex work which is built by re-interrogating the certainties which found the pictorial project in the history of art. The way she uses the canvas by the utilization of blunt or sharp objects can recall the idea that Lucio Fontana had of it. For him, "the canvas is not or no longer a support but an illusion." For Emilie Bitauld, the surface of a canvas should no longer exist only for the gaze of the observer who is immersed in it, but, on the contrary, should open widely to the hazards of its non-pictorial environment. The composition of a painting by this artist is therefore always motivated by a capture of movement in space-time, through the awareness of hidden natural forces, originating from elementary particles and light, which act in an uncontrolled way on the surface of the canvas. Appreciating a strong lighting, the whole forms a quantum work of constant intensity. She brings a particular care to the treatment of the surface of the support, but also to the light and to the color. Her practice systematically reactivates the questioning of the relationship between color and space.
In Big Bang, she superimposes layers of paint, scraping them to bring back to the surface the tints underneath, brushing them, spreading the colors in thick strata or in film, going up to 9 strata in the same painting. In a frantic quest for the "painting we never get to", this painting must please him throughout each associated drying time, to be then questioned, and, in a process of destruction / creation, mistreated with a scraper until the pleasure of the last application of paint.
The canvas is then sometimes subjected to the assaults of the knife, the scalpel, or more subtle metallic instruments. Through this gesture of laceration, scratching, or incision which intervenes then, fragments of stories or spaces emerge on the surface of its compositions. Often impregnated with the memory of the place of creation, without a culture or a time being really identifiable, some signs remain, in a syncretism which spans the civilizations. Lightnings, thunder rumbles, vibrations, breaths, flickers, flames, lava slides, stars and distant stars, do not cease to give rhythm to his painting, made dance.
She shares Rauschenberg's taste for dance: "It is dance that makes clear the consciousness of the present moment, shared by both the dancer and the spectator. The body is the event and this event exists only once (...). It is frustrating that the art of the painter or the sculptor can never approach this still-changing present, never says anything about this life of the body independent of art...". Thus, if his gesture looks very spontaneous, it is rather a dance with a calculated spontaneity that it is about, a walk tending to the choreography. His art is a practice before being a theory. More precisely, it is a sensuality to the test of the canvas, put in residence to compose the movements which will be able to initiate the creative process, to initiate it only: the canvas - it is one of the big principles of the contemporary art, and it is obviously dear to him - is made of itself. It thus takes back to the account of the painter at work the mysterious and limpid word of Wittgenstein according to which "One must always be ready to learn something completely new" (Remarks on the colors, III, 45.).
Jeremy D. Collot-Rosoux
Art critic