ESPRIT

Emilie Bitauld was born in 1979 in Brittany and studied art at the Beaux Arts de Quimper and at the Sorbonne before pursuing her studies in the fields of cultural project engineering, heritage and development. Passionate about cultural exchanges, Emilie worked in France and abroad before devoting herself full time to her artistic practice. She lives in Paris and has had a studio in Montmartre since 2011.

The artist has chosen to present at Esprit Tchaï a selection of recent paintings from the series Big Bang Theories where the infinitesimal and the infinite seem to rub shoulders. Cosmic universes studded with scratches, telluric scratches, stellar or flamboyant scratches, floating in the nimbus of a mysterious mist, are gathered there.

His practice is sometimes immersive and the viewer may be tempted by a 3D dive into the heart of a universe painting.

The pictorial adventure that occupies Emilie Bitauld today began during a cyclone on the island of Reunion. Invited by the Reunionese artists Jimmy Cadet and Richard Vildeman to use their tropical studios during their European tour, she found herself confronted with a reality that, on the Indian Ocean, it seems, sparkles with a rare power. This quest for reality through travel and the discovery of elsewhere is at the heart of her practice. Formerly an expert in intangible heritage for UNESCO and the Ministry of Culture, it is a reality at the frontier of the invisible and the spiritual that she seeks, elevating into abstraction any realistic appearance in her practice. Nevertheless, she always appreciates that the viewer explains what he or she imagines. On the subject of this power of suggestion, she quotes Richter when he explains that the viewer associates an abstract canvas with a familiar image "because everything is rooted in the world, everything is connected in some way to experience. Evoking the approach of this iconic artist, she invites to go beyond the visible.

During the creative process, it is above all a question for her of making images emerge which account for the reality which surrounds us without ever illustrating it. It is a question of keeping one's eyes open, of scrutinizing what appears and always slips away, of capturing the forms of an ultimate and furtive moment. At the origin of his current evolution towards the progressive erasure of all figuration, we find his interest in American abstraction, whether lyrical or more austere as in the case of the expressionist Motherwell. His search for expression is thus constructed as a balance between mastery and abandonment; a balance that we know can never be reached over time, sometimes offered, sometimes stolen, without it being possible to retain it. The work remains, however, profoundly human and sensitive in its very effort at distancing. The spatial apparitions and captured moments that she records are closely related to nature, which is, especially during the creative process, her only opposite.

Therefore, her pieces do not have a specific addressee and are not addressed to any particular culture. She makes them keeping in mind that, not so long ago, art itself had no predestined audience.  For her, the meeting between two imaginary worlds must remain, at least a little, magical. She therefore positions herself in accordance with one of the objectives affirmed by the E.L.A.N. group: "to create and promote an abstract art truly at odds with all the art of media/consumption". Also adept of the spirit of Support/surface, she defends her refusal of the brand image, and the formal non-uniformity. She also claims a perpetual uncertainty going against the conceptual ways or the supporters of the death of art. Her work nevertheless appears as an act of faith in the possibilities and unlimited capacity of painting to invert and decompose the image. In this way, the scope of her work is highlighted by the intransigence with which Emilie Bitauld assumes a personal and critical position towards painting and art.  

It is as a field of experimentation that the artist invests painting, in the broad sense; its materiality, its modes of appearance, of presentation, the support, the canvas, the surface, the coloured 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 she 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 use she makes of the canvas through the use 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 must no longer exist only for the gaze of the observer who abysses in it, but, on the contrary, 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. The artist therefore takes particular care with the treatment of the surface of the support, but also with the light and the color. His practice systematically reactivates the questioning of the relationship between color and space.  

In the current series presented here - Big bang theories - she superimposes layers of paint, scraping them to bring back to the surface the tints placed underneath, brushing them, spreading the colors in thick strata or in film up to 9 strata in the same painting. During this phase, each drying time must correspond to a contemplative pause. The canvas then undergoes, in a cycle of creation / destruction, the assaults of the knife, the scalpel, or more subtle metal instruments. Through this gesture of laceration, scratching, or incision which intervenes then, fragments of stories or spaces emerge on the surface of its compositions. Sometimes 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 her painting, dance.

Emilie Bitauld shares Rauschenberg's taste for dance: "It is dance that makes clear the awareness 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 ever-changing present, never says anything about this life of the body independent of art...".  Therefore, 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 well 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 again with the account of the painter to the 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, 2012