CAROLINE DE BOISSIEU

It all begins with a shock, a percussion. Sometimes emotion is present, sometimes the magic happens without us knowing why. Reading a work in its entirety reveals a project; in an exhibition, it is the approach itself that becomes expression, writing, matter — and it is this that opens up a world to us. The polysemy of forms is luminous. This is what can be read in the rich and complex pictorial language of Caroline de Boissieu: there is meaning, between air and water, opacity and transparency, all tensions are present.
 

The modern world never stops building categories, boxes, compartments, prisons, in which we are expected to accept being confined. Artists are not exempt from this rule and very often submit to it, which in a way limits their supposed freedom of expression. Is the only true freedom not the ability to say “I like,” “I am moved,” to accept this almost animal, primitive emotion we have been taught to distrust? No emotion, no art — because, it seems to me, everything begins there. In front of Caroline de Boissieu’s paintings, it is the amplitude of the gesture that carries us away, envelops us in its folds, layers, and rolls. There is no time for reflection or analysis; we are immediately swept into an elsewhere, a movement, a lightness that will only later reveal its depth. This is the strength of her constructions: the ability to remain on the surface of things while drawing us into abysses that disturb us and provoke the desire to know more, to go beyond appearance, beyond first impressions, and accept to follow them.
 

The complexity of her approach, found in each of Caroline de Boissieu’s works, belongs to the realm of the palimpsest. This stratification — or perhaps better described as sedimentation, often reduced to the simple scraping of parchment — here becomes a long elaboration that seeks to blur tracks and confinements. Between photography, acrylic, pencil, and pastel, all techniques are summoned to give the project the fullness of its expression, its breath. It is this breath, so dear to Eastern artists, that is at stake. All paths converge toward this aim; they conceal, they enclose their secrets.
 

The strength of each work lies in the discoveries that exploration reserves for us. In this sense, it joins the great tradition of landscape painting, where the gaze circulates freely. If emotion lies in immediacy, the approach reveals tensions that, beneath seemingly innocent appearances, soften the violence of our world. Here, apparent lightness gives way to darkness, to the irreducible part of savagery that inhabits humankind.

If Francis Bacon said, “Between Matisse and Picasso, I chose Picasso because he was best able to account for the violence of the world,” then in Caroline de Boissieu’s work, it is this capacity to reveal rupture — to the point of making it almost unbearable, yet without renouncing it — that moves us. There is lightness, not cynicism. A gaze upon the world charged with meaning, and it is this gaze that appears, shapes her work, and gives it its sense.
 

So one can say “I like it,” because it is beautiful and unbearable at once. This painting has the force of a radical poetry that unfolds slowly; it is transparent and opaque, mobile and immobile, joyful and painful. This tension is powerful: between shadow and light, between sky and ocean. Until the final support — that glossy plexiglass — waiting only for one thing: the opacity of time, the final alteration of this open work, suspended between hope and despair… no… hope. It resists.
 

Alain SARFATI, architect, February 2008