Back line — 22,48 m² Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 15 → May 3, 2014

For her second solo show at the gallery 22,48 m², French artist Lucie Le Bouder engages the gallery’s exhibition space with sculptures and a mural in situ resulting from her latest research project at the Darling Foundry in Montréal. A series of drawings made with a cutter will complement the exhibition.

“I put a picture up on a wall. Then I forget there is a wall. I no longer know what there is behind this wall, I no longer know there is a wall, I no longer know this wall is a wall, I no longer know what a wall is. I no longer know that in my apartment there are walls, and that if there weren’t any walls, there would be no apartment. The wall is no longer what delimits and defines the place where I live, that which separates it from the other places where other people live, it is nothing more than a support for the picture. But I also forget the picture, I no longer look at it, I no longer know how to look at it. I have put the picture on the wall so as to forget there was a wall, but in forgetting the wall, I forget the picture, too. There are pictures because there are walls. We have to be able to forget there are walls, and have found no better way to do that than pictures. Pictures efface walls. But walks kill pictures. So we need continually to be changing, either the wall or the picture, to be forever putting other pictures up on the walls, or else constantly moving the picture from one wall to another ".

— Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, translated by John Sturrock, Penguin Books

Moving between painting, sculpture, drawing and architecture, and with a logic that abstains from any hierarchy, Lucie Le Bouder creates works whose abstract character seems to gain in intensity in the face of meticulous efforts directed at the exhibition space. The works of the French artist are marked as much by the immediacy of the gesture as by it’s duration: more than sketches or ongoing research practices they constitute a real thought process dedicated to a form that continues to be in the making.

Umut Ungan