Raphaël Brunel
Estèla Alliaud's work focuses primarily on patient, assiduous frequentation of the spaces in which she is invited to exhibit, with a view to inhabiting a place as precisely as possible, perceiving and deciphering the possibilities offered by its specific characteristics, whether in terms of architecture, volume, panorama or luminosity. This time of immersion also coincides with the meticulous observation of a range of phenomena that she seeks to exploit, often experimentally, through situations partly determined by a simple gesture, devoid of any announcement effect or spectacular bias. At the Pavillon in Pantin, for example, she transfers the movements of light onto the wall using pins whose cast shadows form a perfect alignment (Ligne d'horizon, 2013), for the duration of a fleeting appearance that in most cases escapes the visitor, or reproduces fragments of the sky glimpsed from the window of the Papelart gallery (Le Ciel, même, 2014) on cut-out glass plates, superimposed and simply laid on the floor. This play on transparency and the outward gaze is also expressed in a work logically entitled Fenêtres, in which the artist places the pane of one window against the larger pane of another space, thus imposing a frame within the frame while suggesting a metaphorical shift in viewpoint and landscape.
Minute, almost imperceptible, on the order of Duchamp's beloved infra-thinness, these works, produced with a great economy of means and on the scale of the artist's body, eschew chatter in favor of a focus on the transitory, on transitions from one state to another, on those tilting moments that have as much to do with disappearance as with trace. Like La Forme empruntée (2014), in which Estèla Alliaud molds the ceiling of a cellar before exhibiting the result on the floor above, imprints play an essential role in her work. It functions both as a negative of a form and as a process for the appearance of a new arrangement, a reversal of situation and meaning.[1].
It's easy to see how the artist's sculptural approach can be seen in photographic terms, whether they involve light, framing, fragment or negative. During her residency at L'aparté in Iffendic, Estèla Alliaud initiated two new pieces: for the first (Le lac), she immersed three cotton fabrics of different weights in the nearby pond, allowing them, suspended between the muddy ground and the surface, to gradually deform and imprint the calm movements of the water. The second (Façade) consists of inserting plywood boards between one of the building's openwork façades and the blind wall of the exhibition room. Through these experiments, the results of which are necessarily random, she attempts to test, out of sight, the action of water and sun on materials that have become potential surfaces of revelation, markers of her time on site.On comprend alors à quel point l’approche sculpturale de l’artiste peut être envisagée en termes photographiques, qu’ils impliquent la lumière, le cadrage, le fragment ou le négatif. Lors de sa résidence à L’aparté à Iffendic, Estèla Alliaud initie deux nouvelles pièces : pour la première (Le lac), elle immerge trois tissus en coton au grammage différent dans l’étang situé à proximité, les laissant, ainsi suspendus entre le sol vaseux et la surface, se déformer progressivement et imprimer les mouvements calmes de l’eau. La seconde (Façade) consiste, quant à elle, à intercaler des planches de contreplaqué entre l’une des façades ajourées du bâtiment et le mur aveugle de la salle d’exposition. À travers ces expériences au résultat nécessairement aléatoire, elle tente d’éprouver, à l’abri du regard, l’action de l’eau et du soleil sur des matériaux devenus surfaces potentielles de révélation, marqueurs de son temps de présence sur les lieux.
Meticulous and precise, sometimes on the order of a survey, the artist's procedures also reflect a pronounced taste for process, willingly allowing forms to emerge (or not) on their own. Estèla Alliaud also incorporates photography into her sculptural practice, in keeping with the long history that links these two media, from Constantin Brancusi to Gabriel Orozco. Often bordering on black-and-white, with a full spectrum of grays, the artist's photographs function as speculative tools[2], freezing a movement, a precarious and unstable balance born of various manipulations within the studio or produced, in the cases of Le Lac and Façade, by a natural phenomenon. Instead of video, which is too narrative and capable of capturing the integrity of a process, the artist prefers still images that capture the moment, preserving the ephemeral state of a form. For her, the fragment takes on an aesthetic virtue, becoming both a clue and a trigger for situations that it's up to each individual to decipher and appropriate.
Raphaël Brunel, Surfaces d'impression, September 2015.
[1] Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact. Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte, Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 2008.
[2] See Marguerite Pilven's text on Estèla Alliaud's work in The Solo Project catalog, Basel, March 2013.