Catherine Maria Chapel — Echappée — Maria Lund Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 24 → April 28, 2012

Close your eyes and take the dive; Cathering Maria Chapel’s Escape presents us with a dream in an awakened state or perhaps a voyage into the unconscious: her new drawings are a plastic exploration of substance and absence, through the line and abstraction.

Escape — Echappée

Spaces without specific names or landmarks suggesting an underwater world, the botanical, the intense luminosity of heat, figures, occasionally fragmentary, exist by a simple contour or as cut-out silhouettes. Blended into the environment from which they are barely detached or on the contrary, placed on top, imposed, they evoke another way of being. The vision of these drawings leads to a form of heightened consciousness, where the sensorial reigns, where we see and feel with the body. Like the fresh transparency of water, a breeze’s caress, the smell of the earth after rain, the density of the Blue Hour or the nuances of an autumnal forest, Chapel’s new works bring about a sensation of being, of being more intensely. Like breathing whilst in a primal state, a transcendence, a fusion — where the ‘being’ is both body and spirit.

Matter and expression

Fields of dense or transparent colours, powerful gestures and minute touches, a pigment grain crystallizing, the shadow of matter gone through the paper: Chapel intimately knows paper and the fluid colourings of watercolour and ink. Matter and expression are one. The artist “allows it to come” in a free dialog where the luminous substance of pastel imposes itself at times to an evanescent surface. Recently, Chapel has started to cut out shapes in her drawings, creating silhouettes placed in the foreground of abstract ambiences. The notion of movement is strong and yet the dynamic radiating from the bodies strangely invites contemplation. Escape allows us to meet an elsewhere, whilst also being a little more here.