Sasha Ferré’s practice celebrates painting as a site of limitless imagination in which form, matter and meaning spontaneously and continuously grow together. Ferré’s visual language takes shape from her intimate relationship to her medium. She keeps physically close to her artworks by involving her whole body in her process. Ferré does not stand in front of her canvases while working. Instead, she opts to lay her artworks on the floor, crouching over each one. Working alla prima, she uses oil sticks in ample energised gestures and directly applies the material with her hands, disposing of brushes in order to create a completely unmediated relationship to the material. Ferré savours the sensuousness of the oil medium, using her fingers to blend the creamy viscous material onto each canvas.

Each of Ferré’s abstract landscapes takes shape through improvisation. In a process comparable to jazz music, Ferré relishes in the thought of the unknown, allowing abstraction to unfold uninhibited. Through this process of improvisation, Ferré encourages viewers to form their own interpretations of her artworks, allowing recognisable images to form through her abstract visual language. Whether these images are microbial, vegetal, floral or something else entirely, these canvases let us linger with a motif for a moment before drawing our eye elsewhere.

Seemingly separated from the wilderness in her urban Parisian studio, Ferré uses a deeply material imagination to conjure wilder environments to her canvases. Her abstract visual language draws attention to less tangible living things, conveying an acute awareness of natural processes and microscopic encounters that are invisible to the naked eye but are, nonetheless, ever-present. Germination, vegetal growth, theories of plant sentience and the imperceptible exchanges between microorganisms are a source of fascination for Ferré. An awareness of the unseen, yet crucial, workings of the vegetal world allows Ferré to imagine and create vibrant landscapes that buzz with heterogeneous lifeforms in the midst of an urban environment.

Press release courtesy Almine Rech.