éléphants blancs — 1ère exposition personelle d’Amélie Scotta — Under construction gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 18 → April 29, 2017

I grew up in what is called a “dormitory town”, then lived in apartments in the popular districts of Strasbourg, Paris or Brussels.

For better or worse, my eyes were fed by the urban: the gray sidewalks, the cramped spaces, the light of the metro, but also its architecture and its inhabitants in all their diversity.

My last works deal about architecture and madness. From the excesses of the towers and stadiums to the uncontrollable proliferation of apartment buildings, man seems to be overwhelmed and subjected to this e nergy-consuming machine that he has built himself. Built on record times and at exorbitant costs, these superstructures, or instruments of power, seem increasingly disembodied and disconnected from the human. Fragile monsters that seem ultimately condemned to abandonment or desertion. It is the ambiguity between this seductive surface and its troubling reality that interests me. A disturbing beauty that provokes horror, discomfort and fascination.

In a technocracy that leaves little chance to hasard, drawing is my tool to humanize these landscapes. I isolate existing architectures and transform them by accentuating their ostentatious, invasive, fanciful or absurd character. If all retains a certain coldness by frontality and geometrical rigor, the manual work of graphite or engraving gives it a form of sensuality. It is also corporeal, imperfect, changing. In spite of my desire for control, the accident is imperative: constraints of paper and techniques, inaccurate perspective, even impossible.

I draw slowly and repetitively, confronting the randomness of the hand with the perfection of the machine. I like the drawing by its “poor” character. It requires little means and has no limit, except that of time. A time that I give myself, and that is a way of approaching this frenzy with distance, patience and humility.

— Amélie Scotta