CLEDIA FOURNIAU

For TEN TURNS, Fourniau offers her unique spin on the foundational elements of the painted medium: colour, texture, surface, and frame. Each of these four components of the wall-hanging painted image is rendered both familiar and entirely new, energised with a vigour and levity that belies the weighty history of abstraction that stands behind them. Autonomous zones of colour form the essential grammar of each individual work, though this is not hard-edged abstraction, instead Fourniau’s coloured zones bleed into one another, both across a surface and beneath it, revealing the archival traces of previous layers and marks. For TEN TURNS, Fourniau painted on coloured fabrics and patterned textiles, reinforcing the quality that her paintings build outward toward the shared space of bodily encounters, engendering movement akin to that which the artist used to first bring the works into being. There is something altogether reassuring and grounding about these paintings, in their ability to attract and absorb, to revel in their embeddedness, their soaked reality.

While the dimensions of each work are determined based on the measurements of the studio door and the reach of Fourniau’s outstretched arm, one quality is maintained throughout: a radical openness and embrace of uncertainty. This extends into Fourniau’s decision to decorate each frame of the works on display, putting the boundary between the space of a given work and that of the viewer into permanent dialogue with one another. The unique state of quietude that each painting discloses is uncanny, as if a gentle hush emerges in the process of looking and moving: a powerful reminder of the once sacred space in which these works hang.

The impulse to preserve some element of a given site’s specificity, as in the former Nave of St. Agnes, is also present in the titles of each of the works that comprise TEN TURNS, all of which begin with COLOMBES: the location of the studio the artist used expressly for the production of these works. In this sense, the paintings here are not only placeholders for the images they contain and radiate; the works are both composed, and reach out to, the sites where they were made and where they presently hang. Calling our attention to the frame, with great acumen and subtlety, is perhaps Fourniau’s nod to the centrality of place in her work, its coordinates and the memories that are contained by their boundaries. Painting is both bound and unbound, tethered to a particular environment, and yet completely open to the uncertainties of each new site.