Christine Crozat. In Absentia

About

Galerie Éric Mouchet presents To Meet , the first personal exhibition of Christine Crozat within its walls. This new collaboration is an opportunity to immerse ourselves in an unknown dimension of his work by presenting a series of drawings mirroring his work of sculpture.

In fact, one might be astonished at the place the drawing takes today in Christine Crozat's work. Large formats, patiently streaked lines or dotted lines would lead us to see first in this approach a nuanced practice by comparison with the colorful adventures of some of his sculptures or his video work. In fact, the games of black and white and the work of layers find some paradoxes that punctuate his career.

The exhibition To meet is built around three main groups. The artist presents, in the introduction, a series of drawings on the walls of the first room that includes the new productions of 2017/2018, including the series In the fields and Landscapes . The second set consists of a series of glass sculptures and resin laid on pedestal all relating to foot or walking. Finally, the last major set of the exhibition includes the series of works Tribute to those who lost their legs and self- portraits with the fragile flower , pieces made between 2014 and 2016.

The drawing for the artist is obvious as a daily practice, absorbing the time of work and seeming to punctuate workshop days. We would like to see it as a work of asceticism or a contemplative enterprise. In fact, besides the sensitive pleasure of color, the pencil work insists on the other fundamental aspect of Crozat's work, that of repeated and serial steps that were already embodied by the other mediums of which she was entry. Another recurrence in his artistic approach with the disappearance, or at least a work of omission and circumvention of the motive, as to better represent it in absentia . The drawing, in its conditions, is a tenuous and persistent recording surface and, in turn, another way of showing and revealing the ellipse.

There is a form of evidence when one approaches one's work to imagine this absence.Although this dimension of the artist's work has already been mentioned and discussed several times, the recent evolutions of his line and his approach tend to confirm this tropism of a "hollow" form. As Pierre Wat points out, his approach comes from the dynamic link between the subject and his disappearance:

"The artist does not imitate, she tries to shape a memory. (...) All the art of Christine Crozat lies in this tension, which is the very game of memory, between desire for preservation and acceptance of loss. "

Pierre Wat

Indeed, the work of Christine Crozat is built first in this fragility expressed by the masking and obliteration of the pattern already mentioned. It is this injunction to compel one to look carefully where the matter has been removed. A deletion also sensitive to the yardstick of his practice of layers, especially in the recent series of Landscapesbuilt from superposition of transparent sheets. To this fragility seems to answer under the pen of Michèle Moutashar the feeling of a deceptive absence on the material, "Teeth, sandals, prints, vertebrae ... all the objects of the exhibition (Arles, Musée Réattu 2002 Ndr) will appear thus strangely fluids , reversible, and shiny. (...) From this body to body singular, where the issue is not to mold but to extract, where the imprint is only one of the processes of gasoline, the use of paper gives a pledge additional. "

One of the recent occasions to (re) discover the work of Christine Crozat is the new hanging of the permanent collections of the Musée Réattu in Arles with the exhibition 150 years of art at Réattu. The presentation of a series of historical works by the artist in dialogue with the pieces of the Arlesian collection gives a singular possibility to explore the consistency of composition and subject that develops through time. This presentation puts into perspective the radical vision of the artist of what "remains", the impression of a hollow "passage" and its auratic form in the sense developed by Walter Benjamin in his aesthetic analyzes. Indeed, if we take literally Benjamin's aphorism on the trace and the aura, it invites us to think of the act of creation in the light of the "appearance of a proximity" specific to the time, which makes it necessary to continue, in the negative of the project, the trace on which the visual arts are trying again to seize the event and the experience, themselves more and more imperceptible in the world actually lived. We come back to an injunction that is just as much a question: to meet.

This apparent proximity built into the negative works of Christine Crozat is omnipresent. It can be felt in the Derivatives around a leg or Self-portraits with the fragile flower that seem to echo directly. Constantly working, Christine Crozat's recent works presented in the exhibition offer a new perspective to the artist's memorial work on "what fled", as she could express it radically through a landscape. crossed by the TGVat the beginning of the 1990s. The permanence of the absence facing the body and its imprints, its casts or the simple cutting of its shape in these works also indicates the survival of one of the uses of the drawing as presented by Pline. Former. This is the story of Dibutades, the daughter of Sicyone's potter, who wants to immortalize the facial features of his charcoal suitor. At the moment when it is taking shape, the body of the lover has already withdrawn.

Leo Guy-Denarcy