December 9 • february 10 2024
Opening on Friday, December 8, 2023 from 6pm.
In the château of Espace à vendre, Éclats de nuit, solo exhibition by Alice Gauthier.
The night is calm. It carries the world like a great open stage on which to walk, dance, sing or declaim… perhaps even to dream! To be enchanted by these flashes of life, all too quickly ready to disappear. Barely glimpsed, glimpsed, at the bend of some rich, dark scenery. Nature doesn’t wait. Nature has no time, because it is space and time. It is what we are and what we are by.
Alice Gauthier’s drawings contain all these accumulated mysteries. Light and darkness. Emptiness and fullness. And above all, the beautiful transparency that dresses and composes us, beings of flesh and blood who never stop surveying life, projecting fantastical landscapes. No matter how dark the story, darkness gives us something to see and believe in. And the pigments the artist applies to the surface of the paper draw uncertain reliefs, seas and mountains, washed-out skies and uncertain cavities ready to engulf us. Along the way, she takes us with virtuosity into the twists and turns of a reality that usually eludes us, a world that is nonetheless ours, perhaps too often buried in the depths of our unconscious. With powder and water, and a simple hand on a sheet of paper, she has the power to navigate us through the meanders of our brains, where behind our eyes lies the quietude and voluptuousness of our past and future lives.
Sometimes, all we have to do is slip through the cracks in what may seem a simple setting, or follow a subtly traced horizon line, and we feel invaded by the entire drawing. Taking the side of the work, and that of the artist, is enough to convince us to let go. Just look. Let ourselves be penetrated by the landscape and escape beyond our own perception of art. Alice Gauthier’s work is undoubtedly at its most astonishing in this proposal for transportation. From such little apparent effect to such a hold on our apprehension of the action she unfolds before our eyes. And from the touching candor of her persistence in throwing up a few more sparkles of life, a final echo of the night that our humanity is going through.
Jean-Marc Dimanche
