Rapports de force is an exhibition of monotypes. For several years, the artist has chosen the monotype technique for its qualities as a medium halfway between painting and drawing, and also because it is a means of accessing a particular form of image. What is a monotype? The artist explains: “Like all monotypes, these works are not prints but rather a form of painting obtained by the manipulation of inks on a metal plate, the image then being transferred to paper using an engraving press. »
The exhibition brings together works on paper and on metal created around a theme of encounters that are both human and animal: encounters between Sumo wrestlers, who confront each other or embrace each other, frozen in an ambiguous embrace. Faced with these encounters, seven faces of attentive wrestlers. Further, a large human hand, attracted by the bumpy head of a rhinoceros. Or the friendly weight of a huge toad, perched on top of a human head, or the tension of a muscular man’s neck, juxtaposed with the stocky back of a dog…
“The illusory space of each image is for me like a theatre stage, a space where the shapes and proportions of a face or a body are an ever-moving given, and where the gestures of the characters represented can be both direct and evocative: the unusual exists in the simplest encounters,” explains the artist.
Lorène Bourgeois
Lorène Bourgeois was born in Boulogne Billancourt, France, in 1956. She is a French and Canadian citizen. Lorène Bourgeois' more recent work is divided between two series of paintings: elliptical faces and slates. In both series, she offers an interpretation of the human face, through the fragment (slates) or that of the cut (ellipses). The slate as a fragment thus asserts itself as obvious, an appropriate medium for the face or body fragments that the artist has been exploring for several years. The fragment calls for the fragment, the stone calls for the flesh. When form, image and texture come together, slate - seemingly cold - transforms into a living, skin-like surface.
Artist Profile