×

Blue Print

Blue Print

From ordinary life we might dare to venture to extract mysticism. It would appear as  a ritual by standing in front of Mathilde Denize’s objects where no truth is to be sought, we would then imagine embracing the role of the archaeologist to probe the present and attempt to detect the fragments, witnesses of an elusive totality. If she borrows from everyday life,however there is no appropriation of reality, but an incarnation of memory and attention to the sensitive in the form revealed by assemblies and reminiscences.

The Blue Print - usually on a white background – reflects a technique used for architectural plans and industrial drawings reproducing the standards of the object to be examined from every angle, to project its representation in space.  No drawings, no standards to model for Mathilde Denize but immaterial prints, (blue) thoughts whose trajectory escapes all fixity. As volatile as it may be, what can be captured in extremis from oblivion traces a poetic of forms, and touches on an economy of gesture that we perceive as the deployment of a modest attitude. The gesture follows an intuitive choreography, which skilfully oscillates between painting and sculpture to interfere exactly here, in the middle where the object is born.

If the relation to the medium intensifies in this gap, then we must observe that painting does not cover the form but builds its spatiality and invests the field of representation of the object in the exhibition space. The Gallery Pauline Pavec thus becomes the place where the work is staged. The glazed ceramic assemblies manifest the thoughts that take the enigmatic form of the dream, and take on a memorial dimension. Any semblance of grandiloquence discarded brings the intimate closer, so that something sacred remains in these domestic ex-votos, maintaining a spontaneous pact with the viewer. Where in majesty, heightened, sculptures with an organic appearance contrast with their geometric base, acting as an sign of the sacred form. Each one houses a variation of thought, a transformation of the fragment through gesture, temporality and  materials. However, we would almost end up talking about painting without canvas, yet Mathilde Denize has carved costumes in bas-reliefs from her own waste.  The previous attempts to reach figuration on the chassis resulted in its disappearance, without taking into account a definitive  gesture. Transmuted, the cut canvases sculpt a presence of the body, of the figure, in the hollow by its absence.  The decor created by Mathilde Denize is that of a work in which painting and sculpture intertwine, willingly affecting their identities in a constant movement. Each piece responds to an approach where they combine one into the other to generate an interaction with the real space that can be found in Ree Morton’s work, one of her inspirations about which Lucy Lippard distinguished « a very controlled, but still dispersed and uncaptured space which hovers between the pictorial and the sculptural (…) ». [1]

In front of the passing world, Mathilde Denize takes samples of existence, models immediate impressions where the abstraction of any context prefigures an intuitive language. By seizing what is at frist glance located in the insignificant, the reverse and the discreet, by displacements the form takes on a magical character and brushes the edges of reality. Shaped by the imagination, what resists in the territories of the mind joins the tangible and accesses a part of uncertain, if not fleeting, reality, always imbued with freedom.  

Fiona Vilmer

  1. Essay by Lucy R. Lippard, entitled Ree Morton: At the Still Point of The Turning World, published in 1973 and reprinted in the publication The Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers Volume 87 on Ree Morton published in 2009.

Blue Print