Interest in the materiality of paper has been growing for several years. If the Papier fair, which will be held from August 26 to 28, is already well known, the project PAPERHOLIC: Paper Obsessionstaged at La Guilde and presented until September 11, carefully observes the complexity of this material and is worth the detour.
The collective exhibition, which brings together eleven artistic practices, designed by curator Geneviève Duval and produced by the organization Terres en vue, is intended as a space for reflection and exploration around paper.
Like many others, the artist Sébastien Gaudette, who is one of them, sees a fruitful opportunity in the meeting of these approaches, “which carry the same fascination, but which work the material differently”. These reflect the creative genius and innovative potential of the artists, most of whom are self-taught.
The hidden dimension of paper
Like the Papier fair, the exhibition aims to be accessible to all with its formal and conceptual proposals reconsidering this familiar material. “Everyone uses paper. It is a common element. But to think of it differently, to get it out of the usual apprehensions, that’s what interests me the most,” says Mr. Gaudette, who underlines a generalized concern among the artists in the exhibition.
Sébastien Gaudette, fascinated by the symbol of the loose leaf, offers a series of drawings and sculptures that take up its format. The scribbled and crumpled pages that he stages are reproduced in trompe-l’oeil, giving the paper a new materiality.
“Working on the durability of the material, playing with the image of the crumpled sheet in different ways so that it, contrary to expectations, does not end up being recovered, but rather in a context of exhibition, and therefore of in value, is something recurrent in my practice,” he reveals.
The textual insertions at the heart of his works – “the art of composing without thinking”, ” in my practice, I don’t take the end result into consideration “, “blank page” — form a commentary on the value given to the spaces of trial and error in the creative ritual. “Trying to reproduce imperfections, splashes, has become a way for me to show the process,” explains the artist. We all start with a sketch. Playing with the notion of error, of irregularity, allows me to explore the relationship between the control and the non-control that I have over the material.”
Paper fascinates me with its great versatility. I am constantly discovering the forms that I can give it.
Because if the artist cannot tame the paper when he crumples it, his identical reproduction of the folds and textures that this gesture creates gives him full control in return. Mise en abyme, the leaf is at Gaudette shown in all its states.
Other stories arise in Clara Cousineau, who also uses this motif. Its installation Focus on writing brings together on the wall thin horizontal shelves with blue edges, traversed by transverse red threads and loaded with a collection of objects painted in black. These encrypt the alphabet and compose a hieroglyphic poem to be solved on this life-size “moving sheet”.
“Reading is for most Westerners an internalized, assimilated intellectual process. The mechanisms that are triggered during this activity are invisible to us. In creating this work, I wanted to invert certain material and conceptual codes specific to writing in order to regenerate the simple experience of reading”, says the one who skillfully questions language and its way of being authoritative. “Paradoxically, it is here the objects that name the words and not the words that name the objects. In my opinion, this new spelling is representative of the time in which we live: an era of material abundance. »
Clara Cousineau generates a contemporary imagination where the natural functions of things are blurred, altered, transformed. She offers an oblique reflection on the weight of writing as well as on the value of the object in our relationships with the world: “I like to think that the objects around us can be assembled in a logical sequence in order to form a mirror discourse that exposes certain human realities,” she says, emphasizing her desire to explore the conventions and rites of socialization that pass through paper.
Interested in the formality of paper, other artists offer an exploration of its material possibilities. This is the case of Marie-José Gustave who, by approaching it through the techniques of weaving and braiding, creates the monumental from narrow and fine gestures which leave all the room to the material.
“Paper fascinates me with its great versatility. I am in perpetual discovery of the forms that I can give it”, emphasizes the one who works with derivatives of this material – cardboard, wire and paper pulp. Hypnotic and Coralshis constructions presented in the exhibition, reveal unsuspected textures through the organic, moving and seductive shapes they adopt.
These are born of a gesture in perpetual renewal: the approach of Mme Gustave constitutes a center of manual experimentation dictated by paper and its particular attributes. She thus oscillates between matter and gesture.
The artist comes to wonder about the astonishment now aroused by artisanal practices in our industrialized societies. “My works speak of transmission and universality: it is my meeting point with cultures other than mine, with people who have made the gestures that I in turn perpetuate. It’s a form of language”, explains the one who relies on the contact of her works with others to give them meaning, her practice creating a network at several levels.
Gustave thinks of paper outside of its flat surface, something common among the artists in the exhibition. From a basic material and equally rudimentary gestures—folding, cutting, gluing, assembling—appear, in PAPER-HOLIC: Paper Obsessionnew ways of thinking about our relationship to matter.
This becomes a vehicle of affects: the artists, by manipulating it, sanctify it and place it in different narratives. The project also pushes us to probe the value of the inanimate things that surround us, a common thread to follow soon at the Paper fair.