Béatrice Casadesus — Modulations — Dutko / Quai Voltaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 10 days: September 26 → November 2, 2024

From September 26 to November 2, 2024, Galerie Dutko is pleased to present a new exhibition by French artist Béatrice Casadesus. A series of large-, medium- and small-format paintings, drawings and notebooks will be presented. Under the title Modulations, this exhibition marks the artist’s commitment to the use of light as a subject in itself, free from all representation.
The exhibition catalog is prefaced by Alice Thomine-Berrada, art and architecture historian and curator at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Bringing light into the painting, abstracting, i.e. “drawing from”… It’s about exploring mixed visions and their modulations. Modulations of the immaterial subject, modulation of space, of the colored surface, of its consistency through pointillist treatment. Modulation of color in its relationship to matter. Painting all the modulations by which the painting is constituted, nourished by the painter’s sensibility.

As in music, the gesture, the point, the touch, the vibration bring together system and feeling, testifying to the artist’s process of sensation. The material imprint of the tool is the vector of the colored trace. It mingles with the dreamy imprint that emanates from the physical sensations of light. For Béatrice Casadesus, this vision is sometimes associated with the memory of certain works from the history of art: Seurat, Monet, Giotto, Turner, Anna-Eva Bergman, de Staël, Malevitch… Only the emotion she feels imposes itself on her like an intimate necessity hidden beneath the sensitive expanse of painting.

The title alone indicates a thought process. What Matisse called “Confirming my intention”.

For the past forty years, Béatrice Casadesus has been working on light as the central element of her pictorial approach. Her quest for a modulation of the painting’s constituent elements is fully asserted today. Modulate is a term Cézanne used to evoke his conception of painting. It was taken up by Elie Faure and Gilles Deleuze. The term is generally associated with music. Theater and music bathed her childhood. The silence of painting is her inner music. The sound of words influences the titles of her works (Clere voye, Evanescence, Persienne, Violine, etc.).

These modulations take into account the artist’s particular relationship with architecture, as exemplified by the two monumental paintings Rouge Or and Paradis installed in the foyer of the Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle university at La Nation, built by Christian de Portzamparc.

For this new exhibition at Galerie Dutko, the layout has been conceived as a manifesto for immersion in painting through the interplay of modulations. The narrow, high studio in which these paintings were created encourages superimposition. The gallery space echoes this.