Tania Mouraud — Pourquoi les collines pleurent-elles ? — Claire Gastaud Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 3 → November 23, 2024

Why do the hills cry? We know Tania Mouraud’s architectural-scale writings, her grandiose landscapes and her striking videos. But for the very first time, her exhibition Pourquoi les collines pleurent-elles? features hand drawings and intimate formats that invite us to come closer.

Continuing her research into the plasticity of writing, letters intermingle in the Pasik series (2024). The poem, of Yiddish origin, blurs like a tear-drenched gaze. Unreadable, it expresses beyond words the sadness felt by humankind facing wars that never cease to repeat themselves. The insistence of the gesture evokes an erasure, the perpetual rewriting of the same story, to the point of saturation or obliteration. Or maybe it’s the burnt tapes that have fallen from a projector, playing the same film over and over again.

We can almost see the hills evoked by the exhibition’s title along the shaded outline of a sign, outlining the volume of a letter that looks like a body drowned among its fellows. In the next room, a quotation from Gandhi crashes into a mirror. « Should I go on forever ? » The question is as rhetorical for the Indian political figure as it is for Tania Mouraud, for whom the struggle is not a choice: it will last as long as necessary, even if that means forever.

Further on, the paper is embossed with white letters (Gaufrages, since 2023). Arranged side by side, they draw movements or architectures. The eye wanders between the hollows and contours of the letters. Sign and surface mingle.

One proceeds from the other. They are one and never separate. This form, never detached from its surroundings, is reminiscent of the artist’s positioning within her Initiation Rooms, and indeed in her work as a whole: her installations, photographic series and videos are based on the presupposition that we are part of a whole. Isn’t the greatest risk of all to believe that we are separate from the world, since the world belongs to us, whereas we belong to the world? The plasticized bales of hay in the Borderland series (2007-2010) reflect the surrounding countryside, just as the eye reflects what it’s looking at. Here again, surface and represented object become one. On this plastic material, which pollutes the world from its highest peaks to its deepest abysses, a landscape unfolds as if painted in oils, verging on abstraction. Similarly, it’s our own reflection that we encounter when we contemplate Mots- Mêlés (2018), extracts from poems and operas transformed into geometric spaces and painted on sheet metal.

Landscapes and letters respond to each other. The dark, sign-saturated space of DERTSEYLN 9478 (Canvas series, 2021) recalls the swamps of Film Noir (2011-2021). The Shmues series (2020), in which letters slice through space, echoes Hybridations (2008-2019), in which white lines cut into the negative.

Tania Mouraud succeeds in constantly reinventing herself, while inviting us into a coherent universe. Her recent works interact with older ones, both formally and through the echo of a shared philosophy.

Cécile Renoult — 2024