Corinne Laroche — Mes heures cadmium et lumineuses n’ont rien à craindre des noirs profonds de la nuit — Galerie Laurent Mueller — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 30 → July 11, 2015

Since 2007, Corinne Laroche has been developing a drawing style where a grid constitutes the basic structure, the point of reference and the horizon. This grid is kept more or less visible on the surface, but it is still very much present and allows the intensive and expansive spreading of a simple gesture, not unlike doodling. Once settled, this protocol eludes the questions of compositional choice and technique in order to favour an intuitive approach, just like musical improvisation relies on invisible sheet music.

Talking about sheet music, it was Bach’s The Art of Fugue that gave its name to the series of drawings making up the heart of the exhibition, Rectus-Inversus. “This music reveals imperturbable and perfectly controlled rhythmic properties creating incredible mental concentration; its composition is a set of melodic writings superimposing back and front, shape and counter shape”. Created in 2010 and made up of four diptychs, Rectus-Inversus is based on the pixels of a digital image that forms a starting draft. Each draft generates two two-part drawings, one being the negative of the other one. Presented the same year in Berlin (2010), Rectus-Inversus then provided the matrix of a new set of drawings called Extensions I. These three moments in the development of the piece, from the creation of a draft to the creation of a first set of drawings and its resumption, form the segment of what may be seen as a single drawing, or design: to connect them with moments, spaces, to make them belong to a vital flow of creation appearing afterwards thus gradually creating a “personal geography”.

In fact, the “cadmium and bright hours” in the title is a direct echo to a series of drawings that has been created since 2007 with pencils and pre-chequered paper, Mes Très Riches Heures. They are pages of great sobriety that the artist assimilates to the exercises of a pupil doing their handwriting practice. There is something reminiscent of a copyist monk in the meditative exercise of repetition that underpins the whole of Corinne Laroche’s work, and characteristic of the meticulous work of illumination which is of course referred to in the title.

In the religious tradition of icons which the artist is particularly interested in, the copying of a same figure is not considered as a restriction but rather as the possibility of getting rid of the anecdote related to the choice of its stylisation in order to focus on the sum of all the moments necessary to its apparition. It is the same with Corinne Laroche in that she has established dissociation between the piece’s undetermined duration of creation and the possible emanation of a figure. By “figure”, Corinne Laroche means “everything that may be the object of an evocation of form known by the person looking at it”. Although the piece is not strictly figurative, it does however evoke through its expansive movement a form of geographic territory, a landscape or the cellular formation of a body. With Corinne Laroche, the image is always on its way; its revelation is delayed, as if it was stretched over the timescale of a work of art perceived on the scale of a lifetime.

MP

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Corinne Laroche was born in 1957 in Toulon. She graduated from the National School of Fine Art in Paris. Her works can be found within the collections of the Kupferstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. She has amongst other things exhibited her work the Edouard Manet gallery in Gennevilliers (2000) and at the Galerie du Quai — Toulouse School of Fine Arts (2002). In 2008, Corinne Laroche was awarded the City of Saint-Ouen Prize and had her exhibition Motherland I at the castle of Saint-Ouen (2009). Amongst her first collective exhibitions, we can mention System und Sinnlichkeit at the Kupferstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin (2013), An Exchange with Sol LeWitt at Cabinet, New York and MASS MoCA, North Adams (2011), tour d’horizon with fruehsorge contemporary drawings in Berlin (2009), Anschlüssel London Berlin, at the Centre for Recent Drawing in Londres, Drawing room, in Zurich with the Galerie Bernard Jordan (2011) and Correspondances, with Martin Barré and James Brooks at the galerie laurent mueller(2012).