Camille Cloutier — L’Écho du silence — Marie Cini Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 7 → June 4, 2011

In recent years, the artist has refocused her work on drawings. Initial appearances can be deceptive; these drawings are not pages torn from a sketchbook or a set of illustrations. They bear witness to the artist’s totally autonomous, holistic syncretism, incorporating elements of the surreal. Each drawing moves with an interplay of echoing, rebounding forms, a dynamic of exchanges, surface tensions, semantic shifts and realignments, with the energy of organic composition driven by dreams and nightmares. The drawings combine to map a universe just beyond our reach, as though documenting a fragmented, personal mythology, a tortuous dreamlike meditation, with a disquieting complexity, an effervescent splenetic vision, spellbinding and discomforting all at once.

Camille Cloutier’s white knight characters are caught in impossible situations where nothing is normal in the roles they play. The human figures seem to just barely intrude upon our world, and only to make a sign. Their faceless figures, their nonacademic anatomies—where line delineates and surrounds a void—depict a stripped-down humanity, gestural bodies pitted in a game against nature.

Camille Cloutier’s drawings are not silent, they fill a silence that she chooses to invent and experiment with a certain extravagance. A cuisine rich in alchemy and transposition. Through line, color, words and the artist’s sleight-of-hand, histories emerge “with blocks of color-lines” to let us know,

“This is my world, with its lands and people, oceans and mountains, horizons and all things therein, the whiteness of the evenings and the colors of its days, its beauties and its blackness—a world I share with you, and a world you share with me.”

L’Écho du silence translates a silent fury, a game of murmurs, a confrontation with the mystery of the blank uncharted space where figures are embodied and also fade. A serious game of angels and demons and everything in-between.