CAROLINE DE BOISSIEU

In addition to this, you need to know more about it.

It all starts with a shock a percussion. It happens that the emotion is at the rendezvous, that the magic operates without us knowing why. Reading a work as a whole gives an account of a project; in an exhibition it is the approach, which becomes expression, writing, material, it is this which opens up a world to us. The polysemy of forms is luminous. This is what can be read in Caroline de Boissieu's rich and complex pictorial writing: there is meaning, between air and water, opacity and transparency, all the tensions are present.

The modern world does not stop building categories, boxes, huts, prisons, in which we would have to accept being locked up. Artists are no exception to the rule and very often submit to it, which in a way limits their so-called freedom of expression. The only real freedom would it not be that of being able to say I love, I am touched, I accept this almost animal, primitive emotion that we have learned to distrust ourselves. No emotion, no art, because it seems to me, everything starts there.In front of Caroline de Boissieu's paintings, it is the amplitude of the gesture that carries us along, envelops us in its folds, its layers, its rolls. She does not leave time for reflection, analysis, from the outset you are taken to an elsewhere, a movement, a lightness which will not reveal its depth until much later. Because it is the strength of its constructions, its ability to be on the surface of things while dragging us into the abyss that troubles us and provokes the desire to know more, to get out of appearance, of this first printing to agree to follow it.

This is because the complexity of the process, the one we find in each of Caroline de Boissieu's works, is a palimpsest. This stratification, or perhaps better, sedimentation which we speak of as a simple scratching of parchment is here a long elaboration which hides a desire to disturb the tracks, the confinements: between photography, acrylic, pencil, pastel , all the techniques are called upon to give the project the fullness of its expression, its breath. Because it is this breath so dear to artists from the Far East that we are talking about. All roads contribute to this design, they hide, they lock up their secrets.

This is because the strength of each work is in the discoveries that exploration has in store for us. In this, she joins the great landscape painting, the one in which the gaze circulates. If the emotion is in the immediacy, the approach reveals tensions which under harmless aspects reduce the violence of our world. Here, the apparent lightness gives way to darkness, to the irreducible part of savagery that inhabits men.

If Francis Bacon said “between Matisse and Picasso, I chose Picasso because he was best able to take into account the violence of the world”, in Caroline de Boissieu's work, it is this capacity to see the tearing up to the point of 'to make it unbearable without renouncing that affects us. There is lightness, not cynicism. A look at the world charged with meaning and it is this which appears and constitutes his vision, he constructs his work, gives it its meaning.

So, we can say I like it, because it is beautiful and it is unbearable, this painting has the force of a radical poetry which is revealed slowly it is transparent and opaque, mobile and motionless, cheerful and painful, this tension is there powerful: between shadow and light; between the sky and the ocean. Until the last support, this shiny plexiglass which awaits only one thing, the opacity of time which will be the last alteration of this open work, caught between hope and despair, no. . . . . . . . . . hope, she resists.

Alain SARFATI