Florence Girardeau — Tout se fige alors — Alberta Pane Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 19 → December 23, 2011

Alberta Pane Gallery is pleased to present the first personal exhibition of French artist Florence Girardeau, born in 1980 and graduated from ENSBA in 2005.
The title Tout se fige alors (~ So everyhing freezes) which is insprired by a phrase from Beckett’s short story “The lost ones” (1970), seems to evoke a possible danger. Borrowing forms and dynamics from geological science, the pieces collected by the artist — objects, photographs, a video installation and a whole new series of drawings — keep their balance on the limits of stability.

Florence Girardeau’s work suggests infinitite delocalisations and slow emergences as well as a setting in motion of the regard, at the instance of the myth of Perseus, whose agile vision triumphed over the gorgon Médusa’s stonifying eye. The artist’s works are elaborated by means of a highly precise technic that generates a fluid and delicate universe, almost undefinable, pushing the spectator to develop his very own system of perception. This topic has always been in the centre of the artist’s preoccupations; the experiences of emptiness and plenitude, of the living and mineralic, of emergence and disappearence, incline the ambivalence of every perception whether it be visual or tactile.

Lacune is a video film reduced to a simple outline that is projected against a wooden panel coated with graphite, by its form it evokes “Dionysus’ Ear”, a cave in Syracuse, Sicily. The filmed line is the fluctuate image of a damp stone, partially drying, partially moistening in a slow rhythm. It recalls the idea of materia’s porosity, which in petrography also describes the ratio of the empty volume to the total volume of a rock or a ground. The drawings, rhizomes and geometric forms, unfold over big format papers. They echo the game of form and counterform in Lacune. The protographic triptych Reliefs picks up some images of emerging forms (originally taken independently from each other in 2007), furthermore the French word relief calls to mind the remains of a meal. The object Forer (2) finally seals an image between two black blocks, of which we see but the vertical folding line. The idea of “digging into the image” appears here in a paradoxical way.

It is thus our sensitive relation to space and time that defines the artistic practice of Florence Girardeau. Touching at interspaces and barriers, the pieces of the exhibition Tout se fige alors create a network of correlations.