How can we give shape to time, which is intrinsically impalpable and elusive?
Stains, traces, strata, steps, mechanical swaying, buried images, cast shadow imprints, evolving electronic painting... the attempts made by the visual artists gathered at Topographie de l'art are most convincing. Experimental and poetic, they invite us, "in the age of accelerated time", "to slow down and give priority to observation, reflection and daydreaming1" .
"[...] make time visible [...] crystallize it into an image and [...] trap its thickness2 "This is the quest pursued by Clément Borderie, whose stretched canvases have been painted by the elements, and whose Salt Stones have been sculpted by cows... An adept of "laissez-faire", the artist stretches blank canvases on matrices in the open air, only to harvest them months later once the wind, snow, rain, dust, birds and plants have done their work. This appropriation can also be seen in the transformation of a bistro awning stained by the traces of time ("creating [...] the landscape") into a diptych(Store Auguste Blanqui, 2022).
The thickness of time
As for Cat Loray, she traces the passage of time with her pencil, using the strength of her wrist. The monumental forms she draws "unfold in the space of the white page in fluid, undulating patterns whose often unfinished ends suggest that they may extend infinitely, beyond the material 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 "to feel both the work and the material".
Repetition is also the subject of Dieter Appelt's La tache que le souffle produit sur le miroir (1977). Comprising a series of 12 self-portraits showing the artist blowing in front of a mirror as if to "inscribe time in matter and duration 1", it is, according to exhibition curator Domitille d'Orgeval, akin to 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 and inverted time
In Timezone, a 60-minute digital video film from 2010, Berdaguer & Péjus highlight the irreversible nature of time, illustrating a metaphor used by the American artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973) through the inverted march of a man, similar to a human clock, through grey sand that reverts to black and white after an hour? An artificial and illusory "repairing" march towards the "original order", showing us the impossibility of going back... Just like their Intrusions, these captures of luminous flux on sensitive paper "encapsulated" in wax, turning our fleeting existences into ghostly apparitions...
1 - Domitille d'Orgeval, exhibition curator.
2 - Clément Borderie, Ghislaine Rios, Les Bosons de l'art, Clan Borderie éditions, 2020.
"The shapes of time
Topography of art
15, rue de Thorigny, Paris 3e
Until April 4, 2024
