Cécile Bart
08 May - 25 Jun 2011
Cecile Bart, born in Dijon, lives and works in Bourgogne. Present on the French artistic scene since the end of the 1980s, she shapes throughout her installations a formal vocabulary endowed of a powerful visual identity. Her abstract pieces with geometric outlines fuel the sight with multiple sensorial evocations, creating an outer space's truthful poetry. Organised around the leitmotivs, the grouping of a variety of colourful plans, her way attempts to requalify the field of visibility in the way of different pictorial pieces allowing the sight to literally « flow through ». This way, defining the path of a phenomenal approach of the painting and its outpouring towards space, Cecile Bart's work, shown for the first time in the Galerie Chez Valentin, organises fields of experiences populated by living shapes which spread through the ins and outs of their environment. Here, the surfaces are reacting to the light ; to accommodate the « appearing creations », the viewer entrees a physical walk which engages him to find the right distance to « see ».
For this exposition, the artist occupies the gallery and proposes a set of paintings/screens attached vertically to the ground as well as a composition of mural pieces. The paintings/screens are artefacts realised from Tergal voile, translucent fabrics commonly used in the curtain industry, that theartist paints and wipes as often as needed in order to obtain the wanted colour density. In the end, the canvas thus painted is set on an aluminium frame. The way the connection between the tow elements are connected – painting/screens and mural pieces – thought and created for the stage of exposition but distinct through their techniques and also through the way the inhabit the space, plays on the effect of different dimensions (planarity / relief) while questioning their ambiguous « painting » state. The paintings/screens maintain a certain proximity with the walls, without actually adhering to them, where as the mural pieces merge completely with the building architecture.
By playing with different framing techniques and depth of photographic shots, with variation in the intensity of colour and texture, with the shapes' alternating and layering, with the visual unity of images hence produce seems subjected to a dispersion force, diffracted in sequences then invited to be rebuilt by the viewer in the way that pleases him. These pieces « screens » call then on again and again the unifying principle of sight, which reflects to a physiological process, and the one, far more personal of the imagination. And it is by this overlapping of sometimes conflicting forces, that the viewer is taken to make a «complete» experience which awakes all his senses.
The specificity of Cecile Bart's art is within the expansive nature of shapes that she produces and helps meet each others in the gallery, contaminating and moulding the corners, up to sometimes pushing the walls. Their geometric abstraction, anti naturalist, reties with a natural movement where the colour seems inhaled by the light, and where the shapes take life, uncontrollably drawn past their outlines by some sort of atmospheric push. Through them commutes simultaneously the image and its replica; meaning and shape mixed in an emotional choreography stretching the material limits of the object in order to question the background. The composition harmoniously creates with the building's architecture, merges with it, respecting its natural rhythm while bringing it a new breath. Those paintings contaminate the area, making it vibrate, allowing a new visual and emotive depth. Through this, Cecile Bart surveys the perception mechanisms and incorporate the viewer's body at the very heart of the scene, inviting him to feel through his senses the distance which separates him from the pieces.
Clara Guislain (Translated by Isabelle Bianco)
For this exposition, the artist occupies the gallery and proposes a set of paintings/screens attached vertically to the ground as well as a composition of mural pieces. The paintings/screens are artefacts realised from Tergal voile, translucent fabrics commonly used in the curtain industry, that theartist paints and wipes as often as needed in order to obtain the wanted colour density. In the end, the canvas thus painted is set on an aluminium frame. The way the connection between the tow elements are connected – painting/screens and mural pieces – thought and created for the stage of exposition but distinct through their techniques and also through the way the inhabit the space, plays on the effect of different dimensions (planarity / relief) while questioning their ambiguous « painting » state. The paintings/screens maintain a certain proximity with the walls, without actually adhering to them, where as the mural pieces merge completely with the building architecture.
By playing with different framing techniques and depth of photographic shots, with variation in the intensity of colour and texture, with the shapes' alternating and layering, with the visual unity of images hence produce seems subjected to a dispersion force, diffracted in sequences then invited to be rebuilt by the viewer in the way that pleases him. These pieces « screens » call then on again and again the unifying principle of sight, which reflects to a physiological process, and the one, far more personal of the imagination. And it is by this overlapping of sometimes conflicting forces, that the viewer is taken to make a «complete» experience which awakes all his senses.
The specificity of Cecile Bart's art is within the expansive nature of shapes that she produces and helps meet each others in the gallery, contaminating and moulding the corners, up to sometimes pushing the walls. Their geometric abstraction, anti naturalist, reties with a natural movement where the colour seems inhaled by the light, and where the shapes take life, uncontrollably drawn past their outlines by some sort of atmospheric push. Through them commutes simultaneously the image and its replica; meaning and shape mixed in an emotional choreography stretching the material limits of the object in order to question the background. The composition harmoniously creates with the building's architecture, merges with it, respecting its natural rhythm while bringing it a new breath. Those paintings contaminate the area, making it vibrate, allowing a new visual and emotive depth. Through this, Cecile Bart surveys the perception mechanisms and incorporate the viewer's body at the very heart of the scene, inviting him to feel through his senses the distance which separates him from the pieces.
Clara Guislain (Translated by Isabelle Bianco)