How can we give form to time, which is intrinsically impalpable and elusive?
Stains, traces, strata, steps, mechanical swaying, buried images, imprints of cast shadows, evolving electronic painting… the experiments conducted by the visual artists gathered at the Topography of Art are most convincing. Experimental and poetic, they invite us, “in this age of accelerated time,” “to slow down and prioritize the time for observation, reflection, and reverie.”1 ».
“[…] to make time visible […] to crystallize it into an image and […] to capture its thickness”2 » This is the quest pursued by Clément Borderie, whose canvases stretched on frames have been painted by the elements and the Salt stones sculpted by cows… A proponent of “laissez-faire,” the artist stretches blank canvases over matrices in the open air, only to harvest them months later once the wind, snow, rain, dust, birds, and vegetation have done their work. This appropriation can also be expressed through the transformation of a bistro awning stained by the marks of time (“creating […] the landscape”) into a diptych (Auguste Blanqui Store.
The thickness of time
For her part, Cat Loray uses sheer force of will to trace the passage of time with a pencil. Born from small juxtaposed strokes or long interlacing lines, the monumental forms she draws "unfold across the white page in fluid and undulating patterns whose often unfinished ends suggest they can extend infinitely, beyond the physical limits of the work." 1 To this evocation of the infinite is added "the time of 'doing'", very important for the artist for whom the repetition of the gesture "is a time of reflection, of meditation", allowing one to "feel both the work and the material".
Repetition is also a theme in the work of Dieter Appelt. The stain that the breath produces on the mirror (1977). Consisting of a set of 12 self-portraits showing the artist blowing in front of a mirror as if to "inscribe time in matter and duration" 1According to Domitille d'Orgeval, the exhibition's curator, it resembles a contemporary vanitas: "Through this freeze-frame on the imprint of life and its manifestations, the artist captures the elusive and returns to the obsessions that haunt his work: those of passing time, life, and death."
Suspended time and reversed time
In TimezoneIn their 60-minute digital video from 2010, Berdaguer & Péjus stage the irreversible nature of time by illustrating a metaphor used by the American artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973) through the reversed walking of a man, like a human clock, in gray sand that turns white and black after an hour… An artificial and illusory “restorative” walk towards the “original order,” showing us the impossibility of going back… Just like their IntrusionsThese captures of light flux on sensitive paper "encapsulated" in wax, turning our fleeting existences into ghostly apparitions…
1 – Domitille d'Orgeval, curator of the exhibition.
2 – Clément Borderie, Ghislaine Rios, The Art Bosons, Clan Borderie editions, 2020.
"The Forms of Time"
topography of art
15, rue de Thorigny, Paris 3e
Until April 4, 2024
