Anne-Charlotte Finel — Alors fous moi la paix avec tes paysages ! Parle-moi des sous-sols ! — Jousse Entreprise — Art contemporain — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 24 → May 12, 2018

For her first solo show at the Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Anne-Charlotte Finel visits subterranean places. Whether urban, aquatic, or in forests, these out-of-sight spaces are examined by her camera which crackles in the halo of an electric light. It is in these technological and geological interstices that Finel develops her look-out art, bringing forth a sculptural mushroom, whirlpools of water, or a tropical flower.

Anne-Charlotte Finel is an artist and video-maker who works “at twilight” (French: entre chien et loup, literally ‘between dog and wolf’), to borrow the title of a 2015 video in which she watches some roe deer emerging at dusk from undergrowth on the edge of a city. Indeterminate places, evanescent times, in these interstitial spaces nature reclaims her rights. Since then, Finel has kept her position as a tightrope-walker: between light and shadow, black and colours, and the urban and the animal.

Château en Espagne (2018), Triste Champignonniste (2017), Fosse (2018) and Jardins (2017), all on view in the gallery’s first rooms, are the continuation of this landscape work. Invariably in half-light, this time the artist puts herself as close as possible to her subjects, and examines them. Surrounded by a vibrating darkness, the vegetable and mineral motifs rise up vaguely like stylized Art nouveau ornaments. Anne-Charlotte Finel does not disguise her work tool, quite to the contrary, she handles her HD camera in such a way as to cause optical mistakes which lend an extra material quality to the pixels and emphasize the subtlety of the filmed object. With her silkscreened works, the artist extends her research to the style making the image and its grid, using the vagaries inherent in this manner of expression. Here, too, a brisk elegance comes from the technical irregularities.

Mixed with this discreet romanticism is another intent underscored by music which fills the gallery and keeps us on our toes. For this show, the artist first takes us underground and underwater; she abandons open-skied landscapes for their disquieting underlay. For Anne-Charlotte Finel, what is involved is going to see what we are walking on, what is supporting us, and underpinning us: this is the netherworld referred to by Estragon in Waiting for Godot when he exclaims: “You and your landscapes! Tell me about worms!”. Leaving appearances behind to find ambiguity. In a society where transparency is being flouted as the new political grail, the artist looks precisely where confusion remains. Between two categories, she chooses the blurred space of junction, where definitions disappear and let something else come forth. A ruined castle, Parisian basements, a chasm of water, the outskirts of airports, all so many uncertain interstices in which she becomes involved in quest of that which, when worked by her camera, transforms these space-time frames into perceptible terrain. To underscore the image, Luc Kheradmand, a musician and long-time associate, imagines acoustic layers which cohabit in space and create an atmosphere made up of as many pieces as there are videos. With each one having a different time span, the exhibition’s sound track is thus a random arrangement which helps to blur the boundary between one work and the next.

To wind up the visit, Finel turns her camera towards airport skies. In a diptych titled Effaroucheur (2018), the haloes of light become brighter and more numerous, blurring the information filmed by an infra-red camera. Finel is looking neither for the precision of her night camera, nor for the detail of ultra-modern machines. She watches airplanes, like prey. They are light motifs to be captured, in order to soar and get out of the frame.