Charlotte Moth — par les lueurs — Marcelle Alix Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in about 1 month: October 12 → December 21, 2024

« In this white we lived coloured lives. » Derek Jarman

Isabelle Alfonsi: I remember Charlotte’s solo exhibition organized in 2017 at the gallery entitled “Lightly in the World.” This title—borrowed from a text by Ian Hunt about her work¹ —continues to resonate with me whenever I think of Charlotte’s work, of the precision and lightness with which her gaze settles on places, from her Travelogue² to the images of the Giacometti Institute and the Maison Louis Carré, presented today at the gallery. It’s this organic and fluid nature, inviting the representation of places where she has previously exhibited into the new images she produces, that makes us deeply connected to her artistic practice. We travel through these works, moving from space to space, pausing with the artist on the details that captivate her, drawn into a kind of poetry that can be found almost anywhere. We feel familiarity with the forms that populate Charlotte Moth’s works, everyday objects selected for their sculptural and chromatic qualities, carefully orchestrated to resonate with the analogue photographs, whose softness continuously touches us. For nearly twenty years, she has affectionately united a sustained interest in the geometric forms of modernist architecture and minimalism, a taste for the decorative and ornamental, and a deep connection to nature. The installation in the basement, titled The dead-end dispute between the wave and the shore, perfectly represents this triple alliance and her method, executed with such lightness. On the floor of this room, with its more or less orthogonal lines, the artist has placed duck feathers, disrupting the raw aspect of the space so that we might imagine it of another kind. An image of her sculpture To a Favourite Tree, taken during her recent exhibition in the garden of the Maison Louis Carré³, complements the installation. By simultaneously considering the shadow lines of a minimalist cube disappearing under the growing grass and the feather carpet concealing much of the concrete floor, we understand that for Charlotte, these are not mere decorative gestures but acts of genuine care for the spaces and sculptures that comment on and enhance them.

Vue de l’exposition Charlotte Moth, par les lueurs à la galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris Courtesy de l’artiste et galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris, 2024 — Photo : Juliette Pelletier

Cécilia Becanovic: Several years ago, I discovered this lecture by writer Italo Calvino on lightness. Of all those gathered under the title Six Memos for the Next Millennium⁴, it was the one on lightness that struck me the most. Calvino explains that his literary intervention translated into “a subtraction of weight.” This overarching definition of his approach seems to correspond to the path Charlotte Moth has taken. Through the concreteness of things, by gravitating toward what is small, mobile, and light, she ensures that the weight of matter never overwhelms us. Whether in her photographs, sculptures, or gestures dedicated to space itself, Charlotte Moth always feels the need to move toward unpredictable deviations to dissolve the density of what surrounds her. She calculates the passage from one form to another and transmits immaterial messages in a world of weightless atoms. Through subtle sequences that involve a degree of abstraction, the internal rhythm of the exhibition reveals its suggestive power—without haste and without the merciless gaze of Medusa, as evoked by Calvino. Charlotte Moth has a fondness for mirrors. They help her look at what surrounds her through reflections or dim glows. These indirect modes, and especially the lightness akin to Perseus, who often guided Calvino, are Charlotte Moth’s great allies. She frequently relies on the lightest elements: handfuls of feathers scattered on the floor, grass gently concealing a form from view, a colored filter as effective as a new coat of paint, images or objects captured in mirrors, as if to live-perform the beneficial instability of perception, which often bridges the gap between photography and sculpture that the artist consistently puts in contact. This desire for indirect vision softens each gesture, allowing us to consider them through different lenses. Myths teach us to love opposites (here, lightness and gravity), especially when these opposites create space for the most minute traces, those that breathe life into an exhibition over time. Charlotte Moth’s last three exhibitions at the gallery share this feat of connecting different places together by using an action and its various echoes in reality. By changing her approach each time, Charlotte escapes, as much as possible, from the force of gravity and the heaviness of existence. Charlotte, as Calvino wrote, you could have thought this: “The images of lightness I seek must not, upon contact with present and future reality, dissolve like dreams…”⁵

Vue de l’exposition Charlotte Moth, par les lueurs à la galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris Courtesy de l’artiste et galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris, 2024 — Photo : Aurélien Mole

Charlotte Moth was born in 1978 in Carshalton, United Kingdom. She has been living in Paris since 2007. The Serralves Foundation in Porto (2011), Centre d’Art contemporain de Genève (2012), Esker Foundation (2015), CA2M -Centro Arte Dos de Mayo, Spain (2019) organised solo exhibitions of her work. Tate Britain commissioned and exhibited her series of works Choreography of the Image in its Archive Room in 2015-2016. Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein has hosted an important solo exhibition in 2016, accompanied by a monographic publication: Travelogue (ed. Snoeck). The exhibition has toured to Parc Saint-Léger art center and the MIT List Visual Center (USA). The Musée d’art moderne et Contemporain Saint-Etienne is preparing with the artist a monographic exhibition in April 2025 for which she is developing a new work that concentrates on the art and design objects in their collection.

Warmest thanks to: Sara Agutoli, Clotilde Beautru, Marta Cervera, Carole Grand, Emmanuelle Laboue, Thimothy Larcher, Emmanuel Lefrant, Les Lilas, Anna Milone, Asdis Olafsdottir, Juliette Pelletier, Chloé Poulain, Beau Moth Tang, Joseph Tang, Josselin Vidalenc, Fondation Alvar Aalto in France, Centre Cultural Jean Cocteau, Lightcone.

¹ In Charlotte Moth. Travelogue, monographic publication, ed. Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein and Snoeck, 2016

² A travel journal in images that formed the backbone of the artist’s work during the first ten years of her practice.

³ “The Extra Step” cur. Isabelle Alfonsi & Cécilia Becanovic, Maison Louis Carré, Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, 2024

⁴ Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Vintage books, 2016

⁵ Italo Calvino, Ibid