Correspondences and Elevation

An Installation of Paintings 40’x12′
Formats: [60″x36″], [48″x36″]. and [36″x36″]
Each painting: acrylic on canvas

Created between 2007 and 2010
Exhibited at the San Diego Art Institute / Balboa Park / San Diego, CA
June 18 – July 18, 2010

The series shown in this exhibition comprises paintings inspired by the Pacific Ocean and the desert surrounding San Diego, where I live. The series of paintings questions the relationship between human beings and nature, echoing the catastrophe of the massive oil spill unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico right now.

Seas, oceans, and deserts have always been part of my life. I was born in Marseille, a French town on the Mediterranean Sea. I then lived in Dakar for several years, on the Atlantic Ocean and in the Saharan desert. When living in Paris, I would often go to the Atlantic Ocean. Living in California, I now find inspiration in both the Pacific Ocean and the surrounding deserts. I spend time watching people walking on the beach. In the desert, the people in the paintings are mostly my family.

I am profoundly attached to empty landscapes and spaces. This attachment was given to me by my father at a young age. “The Flower of Evil”, where one can find “Elevation” and “Correspondences,” was the first book of poems my father gave to me when I was in my early teens. I read “Elevation” at his funeral.

These two poems are a hymn to nature and also carry nostalgia and sadness for a lost paradise, which echoes what is happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico..

I take photos wherever I go. I then work these photos in Photoshop, keeping only the essential elements. In the end, I paint the images on large canvases.

When I started organizing the pieces that now constitute this series, I used canvases identical in height but varying in width. They fit together both physically and in content, like stanzas of a poem. Some of these paintings were originally created as diptychs, and the diptychs appear in their entirety here.

The arrangement and composition of this group of paintings invite change. This composition could absorb new paintings; pieces could be reorganized and presented differently in spaces of different proportions.

For this exhibition, I first considered the dynamics of the space, experimenting with the size of the wall and the scale of the art, and with how one can read the piece as a whole from a distance and each element up close.

Each element is a result of my experiments with outdoor spaces. This exhibition is an opportunity for me to experiment with bringing these elements into a relationship with indoor space.

I borrowed the title “Correspondences and Elevation” from two of my favorite Baudelaire poems. Those poems express a connection to a sequence of scenes from a life and a living landscape.”

“Correspondences” by Charles Baudelaire
“Elevation” by Charles Baudelaire

 

PRESS
San Diego City Beat / Arts and Culture / Art Everywhere / June 30, 2010