Michaële-Andréa Schatt — Paysages — Extérieur Nuit — Seconde partie — Isabelle Gounod Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 3 → 26, 2012

In Michaële-Andréa Schatt’s previous exhibition, “Paysages en ose” (Daring Landscapes) Duchamp’s jingle was seen as an invitation to become engaged in the practice of landscape painting without restraint, painted pink in superposition, masking, misusing, contaminating the landscape being seen.

This new “Landscapes / Outside — Night” series reveals what lies underneath her painting in a way, its shadow, something that has been part of her painting, drawings, photography and ceramics for a long time. Wearing shadow, as if wearing clothing. Michaële-Andréa Schatt lifts the veil. There is unveiling. To bring out the light of a shadow, to reveal it in a photographical, cinematographic manner, Schatt works her paintings through the black preparations. The presence of Black is influential in these “Outside — Night”. Here, it is about painting backwards from her normal work, where the backgrounds were prepared in a vivid white.

In her reflexion about landscapes during her residency at the “Domaine de Kerguéhennec” in 2011, Michaële-Andréa Schatt experiments with two logics that she deploys: that of a card and that of a tracing.
The card plays upon opacity, expanse and the horizontal (paintings on canvas). Schatt maps out the surrounding areas using sombre, horizontal, dense paints, organized in diptychs or triptychs, as with her photographs and in the follow up of her drawings. “Seeing in Black” (Chinese ink and gouache).

She appropriates a new support for herself, tracing paper- and is impregnated with places (ponds, springs) through a game of transparences, superpositions, verticality, reflects. This support allows her to play the transparence, fluidity, in this way unveiling a horizontal “Rorschach” in the landscape’s fold.

Michaële-Andréa Schatt did a series of black and white analog photographs using a “half-frame” system which enabled her to juxtapose two consecutive photographs of the same place. Harnessing the movement of shadows, the dimension of the area’s sound, vibrations, musicality and rhythms — that is found again in the series of drawings on graph paper. It is about inscribing a type of pause on the picture, immobile in the mobility, mobile in the immobility.

« Obscurity and shadow are two notions that weave and cross all representation. This darkness, hollow memory, reveals the constant example of a variable topography of perceptions and experiences: getting lost in the hollow, feeling a semi-obscurity on a scale of the void, the weight of the shadow, its shape, its colour, its strangeness, a negative response to the solar eye”.
Michaële-Andréa Schatt, 2011.