Cutting and cuttings
Watercolors
Multiples Gallery, Paris

Curator: Gilles Drouault
Scenography: Studio Philippe Apeloig

Cuttings
To begin, there is a series of fifty watercolors, each featuring one single cut in the center of a page, as if discarded. No other feature or clue is there to indicate the space in which the object was placed. It seems to float, to levitate. The diagrammatic drawing gives this red and orange pot the look of a pictogram, or of a silhouette. Through the geometrisation of its forms, the cut becomes the testing ground for visual experiments in saturated colors, bringing to the fore the object’s conceptualisation rather than its reproduction. The colours are so dense that some of the paper’s fibers, soaked with pigment, are ripped by the repeated brush-strokes. The object is viewed from the front in its profiled flare, from above as a perfect circle, sometimes from below or via a detail so up-close that the substance of the object is a gradient that fills the entire page. The cut stands out from the white background of the paper, whose granular texture is inviting to the touch. Otherwise, all that remains is the outline, which almost disappears and blends into the plane. Where does this cut originate? What does it contain?
The void holds as much significance as that which is full. Enigmatic and modest, luminous or plunged into darkness, the repeated drawing of the cut creates a poetic rhythm, and reveals a potentially personal story. The story of an object offered by somebody who would have disappeared, but leaves a singular trace in the presence of one who observes and draws it, anxious to keep a memory intact. This series of watercolors offers the viewer a set of subtle and multidirectional variations of a personified object, charged with the reflection on the nature of presence and absence.

Découpes
On the other hand, there is a series of monochrome watercolours from which lines, patterns, and letters sometimes emerge. All are incisions cut with a scalpel in blue areas with subtle shades: Indigo, Prussian, Cerulean, Phtalo. These apertures provide a glimpse of the white paper, and draw letters in negative: the reserve becomes illuminated.
Unlike the traditional watercolour image, here the colours are dense, intense, saturated, as a result of of repeated strokes across the paper. These thin openings are also found in more organic forms, black and fragmented, which join together like shards gathered on the paper. Their fragile agglomeration, somewhere between tension and magnetism, makes it possible to observe the continuities of the embryonic letters: neither typography nor calligraphy. They are beginnings. Emerging from these variations of black smoke, ivory or gray Payne, bursts an alphabet.

From March, Saturday 15th to May, Saturday 11th 2019
Galerie de Multiples
17 rue Saint-Gilles
75003 Paris

More informations on the gallery’s website