Pierre Roy-Camille — Earth, Wind & Fire — Since Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 16 → April 21, 2012

This collection of drawings from Pierre Roy-Camille is consistently realised on glossy photo paper sheets in the A3 size, using oil pens. These sheets are then put together to create bigger size sheets.

This is a rocky forest, made of burning bush, waves, sunset or even explosions and dense clouds. It is a rigorous succession of black lines, more or less thick, that makes the image appear.

This framework of lines and dots makes one think of a printing technique: silkscreen printing, engraving or ink printer. By borrowing to this formal vocabulary of reproduction, Pierre Roy-Camille cleverly modifies and plays with the lines’ scales. The use of those skillfully sharpened pens, whose ink produces traces on the black and glossy surface, shows us “the handmade” without any doubt.

The obsessive rigour deployed at the elaboration of these images makes us think rapidly to the time spent to make them, to the concentration it requires, also probably to the ungrateful labour.

The drawings built in polyptych only appear as a set when all elements are combined together, these sheets being only a succession of signs producing nothing really identifiable so far.

These compositions, like the nature, draw themselves alone. That is to say progressively and by a careful association of simple things; the artist uses lines, like nature uses atoms. He combines, articulates, composes. If every line can exist in its own right like any atom; orchestrated as a whole, they enable the appearing of the images, like the atom of matter.

This process evokes the long journey of the naturalist researcher, who, after observing such of such phenomenon, tries to reproduce it. By a patient drawing, he symbolically engender the growth of all things, giving progressively life to a proper universe, line after line and sheet after sheet.

The time of these elaborations opposes the time of the represented images: explosions, smokes or currents embody just as many furtive moments that belong to our collective memory. We are talking about their reactions here, and it is their finality that is represented to us. Here, this finality is for the viewer the point of entry that allows us to deconstruct this image and to decipher all the tools of representation.

Pierre Roy-Camille is one of those who exalt a contemplative posture, mimicking what he perceives from nature. The work presented here establishes a subtle game between the time of “making” by hand, and then of “de-making” with the eye.

This balance produces a movement close to breathing or breath that invites to both an instinctive and erudite approach of his work. (C. Tricaud)