Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel — Liquid(e)space — Jean Fournier Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 8 → July 22, 2017

Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel — Galerie Jean Fournier Depuis le 8 juin, les oeuvres de l'artiste Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel habitent les murs de la galerie Jean Fournier dans le cadre de sa... 2 - Bien Critique

Galerie Jean Fournier is pleased to be presenting Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel’s second solo exhibition, a grouping of recent works comprising inks on paper, inks and paintings on (and under) glass, and mural reliefs on card and tracing paper on the cusp between sculpture, collage and painting.

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The use of paper aside, these various pieces have several “motifs” in common: obliteration (lighter-coloured geometrical shapes in among ink stains); gaps (sections cut out of the image support, broken edges); images that are absent (black outlines of the strips of tracing paper, like a veiled, Expressionist-lit film) or impossibly elusive (blurred, shifting reflections on the aluminium areas); liquidness (stains, runs) checked by the structure’s geometry and the metallic edges and lines that orchestrate the surface; and the transparency of the glass and tracing paper overlays. In the reliefs and the inks on glass the various elements are assembled via “false match-ups” and recomposed fragments; and the geometry is everywhere challenged by the unpredictability of colour that is poured rather than painted and of materials that subside, break up, fold or are overlaid. Paradoxically Jézéquel’s constructions are founded on imbalance and instability: the world she wants us to experience is one of breaches, discrepancies and dichotomies, and like free rock or jazz it rejects immobility in favour of rhythm and intensity.

Vue de l’exposition Crédit photo : Alberto Ricci

Since the 1990s Jézéquel has been addressing a sculpture situated on the fringes of drawing and architecture, both in a reinterpretation of materials normally used in the construction industry and in an ongoing dialogue with a history of the discipline from the Russian Constructivism of the 1920s to the American Minimalism of the 1960s — not to mention the idiosyncratic adventures of artists like Eva Hesse and Lygia Clark. Her use of “staining” rather than painting is also reminiscent of the “Support-Surfaces” and BMPT (Buren/Mosset/Parmentier/Toroni) movements of the 1970s.

The relative spareness and prosaic character of her materials are constantly tweaked in the direction of a certain sophistication: that of the reflections, transparency and superpositions brought to the recent series by the use of aluminium, tracing paper and glass. In the wall reliefs the straightness of the metal bars contrasts with the pliability of the tracing paper; and in the works on paper the fluidity of the inks coexists with the undeviating ruled lines.

Vue de l’exposition Crédit photo : Alberto Ricci

Unquestionably, though, it is in the works on (and under) glass that her personal creative ethos is more overtly revitalised. In them she combines several materials and juggles with the ambivalence of their properties: transparency and opacity, fragility and robustness. Using the cutting-out, superposition and juxtaposition of paper, glass, inks and lead strip, she creates the mural works — part painting, part sculpture, part drawing — she was already conjuring up in a 2012 interview with Joëlla Larvoir: “This interweaving of drawing and sculpture has been present almost since I began. Drawing in sculpture or sculpture that looks like drawing.”