| The VOICE gallery invites you to the opening of the exhibition Stuff by SIBYLLE BALTZER Saturday April 9th, 2022 at 18.30 pm.
With this new exhibition, the gallery resumes a series of solo shows that had been interrupted these last couple of years of hard times and difficulties in meeting one another. The gallery remained open, offering an outlook on its ten year-course, through the two exhibitions ELEMENTS #1 and ELEMENTS #2.
To paint is to suggest colour as emotion and the confrontation between solids and voids are some of the characteristics of Sibylle Baltzer’s work, as described by Bernard Collet in the following introductory text:
“My first encounter with the work of Sibylle Baltzer took place in Marseille more than ten years ago – thanks to my friend Jean-Pierre Alis in the very historic Athanor gallery. He wanted to defend the work of this young artist – an artist in whom he had sensed that which he had always looked for in the painters he exhibited. An ability to conceive artistic proposals far from the shimmering shards of spectacle and effect imposed by the dictatorship of the art market. A painting close to a poetic language in a way – which would have more to do with the proximity of the void than that of the full. A painting which would tell nothing but whose presence, supremacy of color and richness of material would summon the absence. I saw in the canvases of Sibylle Baltzer this confrontation between solid and void, that of painting with the support often left raw, a canvas stretched and chosen for its visual quality, its presence already as a material raw and naked, which she leaves visible on large surfaces as an essential part of her work. There is in Sibylle Baltzer’s work the inscription of a form that rubs shoulders with abstraction but which maintains a remnant of significance, a meaning that is not hidden but detached from any discourse.
It is in this illegibility of meaning, in this loss that it gains in plasticity and provokes our sensory depths. There is a great sensuality in showing the paint in this way – spread out, left in the memory of the gesture and friction of the brush. There is indeed no form that’s not situated between wound and caress, has a trace of effort that is both affectionate and aggressive towards its support. Yes, the painting is still there – far from the code of abstraction or geometry where we feel a « discordant fragility of forms » that the Cuban novelist Zoé Valdès spoke about in Sibylle’s work.
Today, this new series of canvases and paintings in volume is the in-depth continuation of this work on the wire – between geometry and subtle play with space. I remember citing the work of the Swiss painter John Armleder and the Neo-Geo movement, which explored beyond abstraction, painting becoming an object. We are in this continuity, in going beyond painting, in a form of irony even with regard to the academicism of abstraction – when objects or cut surfaces are mixed with abstract paintings, in a salutary distance with the work of art and in the attempt to trivialize it. The same acid colors and little pops, bright pinks, soft greens, yellow strips crossing the space like flashes of light in stretched landscapes – always this search for movement in pure color to instill the presence and the visual power of the painting.
Yes – Sibylle Baltzer in this recent work attempts to surpass in another way – that of assembling the painting by a skilful game of cutting out its very shape. Her work on geometric deconstruction had to go through this. This series whose edges are painted in another color leave the field open to optical effects and illusions of volume. It is without leaving the « painting » that Sibylle Baltzer creates these painted volumetric devices, multiplying the angles of view. She who has never refused the influence of the masters, drawing from the common heritage of the history of abstract art to implement a language that would be her own, today develops a system of vision that compels the viewer to no longer stand positioned in front of the painting (as with the game of perspective in the Renaissance) but to move sideways to reveal the volume. Here is proof that painting continues to be an endlessly questionable medium, renewable in its implementation. No need then for additions of gleaned materials; of « already there » paint. It is the painting that takes on the status of an object – with no function other than the decorative. But why deny it? This « function » has not always been that of painting? To paint is to suggest color as an emotion. Polychromy and the relationship of colors between them install this emotion, which Claude Viallat would not deny. He was her teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
It is this outcome in her work that appears today. This color deposited on kinds of cut-outs and geometric constructions, this volume with a minimum of means – this makes so little sense. A painting that explodes in the space of the wall as if to make an image of its lost flatness, and would do this with joyful color. ” |
