Sliced Paintings - Everything is in Everything

About

Elodie Seguin has defined a unique approach to painting which explores the relationship between several painted objects as well as their organization within and their relation to the given exhibition space.  Oftentimes the elements of her works, consisting of materials such as wood, paper, MDF, or cardboard, are not joined together but are simply placed on top of or next to each other, leaning on the gallery walls or carefully placed directly on the floor of the exhibition space.  Usually we find the single surfaces of these elements painted in somewhat unique monochromatic colors which are not easy to categorize, tending to oscillate between red and orange, yellow and ocher, blue and grey, etc., and always subtly balanced against each other. In its reductivist tendencies Seguin's work reveals an obvious affinity to the minimalist tradition. At the same time her theoretical and phenomenological interest in color as a dimension of perception links her approach to a modern tradition of painting which began with Mondrian and Malevich and found its continuation with artists like Truitt, Newman, Palermo, McCracken and others.

For her exhibition at Daniel Marzona Elodie Seguin wrote the following notes:

I did 40 independent works but they will have a dialogue with each other because of their number, color and their modular aspect.

I painted the "slices" as the surfaces with a lot of care in order to make them appear with the same quality and to produce a volume of color.

I tried to play with the immateriality of color, making a drawing of the element it overlays. 

I tried to reveal an ambiguity between plains and edges, extending the surface as a pedestal because of its thickness. 

I cut hundreds of small pieces of wood, activating them as leftovers of a history of painting, everything mixing, interlocking, and influencing itself. 

Everything is at a human scale in order to be easily manipulated. 

Elements are most of the time simply laid one on top of the other. The only ones stuck together and finished into a final state are the simple compositions which hang as canvases.

The color becomes an evocative volume depending on its dimensions and how it is confronted.

Green will be missing.

There is a spontaneous, experimental dimension to my process, building and conceiving the exhibition during the painting itself, by trial and error. "There is a logic to every mistake."

I did everything myself, by hand. I don't use power tools. I find and mix the colors, sand the wood, paint and lacquer all the surfaces.

I know the type of surface I want to manipulate, but I need observation and study to develop a sensitivity, to enable accidents, and potentially to catch the materials in different states. 

I hope this way of working will be visible in the exhibition.

My first line of thought was to question painting by manipulating the color as an object to be confronted.

Elodie Seguin studied at Villa Arson, Nice and at Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Her solo-exhibitions include the French Cultural Institute, Milano, Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, and Hillary Crisp, London. Group exhibitions include MUDAM, Luxemburg, MACRO, Rome, Fondation Ricard, Paris, Villa Tokyo, Tokyo, CCC Andratx, Majorca, Gallery Vistamare Pescara, Fantaspazio, Milano, and Biennale de Belleville, Paris.

The artist lives and works in Paris and Avignon.