Pauline-Rose Dumas — Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard
Amid the meanders of an expanding plastic thought, at the very heart of the intimate reflection the artist sustains with her own gesture, Pauline-Rose Dumas presents, for her first solo exhibition at Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard, a joyful and sensitive composition.
Pauline-Rose Dumas — Studio Everywhere @ Anne-Laure Buffard Gallery from October 11 to November 22. Learn more This exhibition inhabits the gallery’s various spaces and transforms them into resonating chambers for a singular way of inhabiting space through creation, and of being, in turn, inhabited by it. Between the rigidity of steel and the suppleness of fabric, Pauline-Rose Dumas orchestrates a tension that is both contained and enduring. Her works, traversed by this duality, play with fullness and emptiness, loops and flourishes, tracing a plastic script in which each gesture becomes a sign, each fold, a phrase. This silent language unfolds across walls and floors alike, revealing the secret life of the spaces she inhabits and reinvents with rare acuity.
Composed of recent works alongside earlier pieces, the exhibition unfolds like a living organism, sometimes yielding to spatial constraints, sometimes freeing itself from them to inscribe its own narration. Dumas replays the scenes of her inner theatre with a generosity that heightens the directness and intensity of her practice. From the exhibition rooms to the reconstituted studio behind the scenes, visitors weave their way among the inhabitants of this mental space, contorting themselves to glimpse drawings and images that are far from mere reflections of her installations. In contrast to those that cut into and envelop the space, these works abandon any decorative function, instead opening breaches toward an elsewhere that brushes against us. Constrained, the viewer takes note of the many symbols haunting these works, yet cannot help but perceive within them a poetic charge that disturbs their effects only to sharpen their intensity.
Throughout this sensitive journey, the artist escapes the pitfalls of pure image-making to develop an aesthetic of texture and imbalance, where precious irregularities and obscure extensions reconfigure the hierarchies between objects, forms, and tools. Ornamentation, surrender, and composition grant a substantial place to the living presence of materials: weight and restraint become strong affirmations, their roughness underlined by repeated gestures — charcoal on steel, stitches and folds on fabric.
Pushing contrast to the point of tension, Dumas unfurls aerial textiles with delicate prints that extend from metallic structures now freed from their role as supports. These in turn twist, coil, and escape, undoing our confidence in line and form.
Here begins a subtle synthesis (almost an unnatural fusion): Dumas folds squares of fabric, drives them around steel rods, raising the foundations of hybrid constructions where the framework spills beyond its bounds and the matter, flesh-like and vibrant, seems in turn to uphold the equilibrium of the whole, as though animated by its own atmosphere. The studio is everywhere as the exhibition’s title says, as much as everywhere is the studio.
Now alive, frames and motifs merge with the latent potential of their materials, generating new, almost organic forms that appear to obey the order of a primal nature the artist rediscovers within them.
