Pauline d'Andigné

About Seeing is an experience. It presupposes an eye, even two, of sensation, and sometimes of thought. Seeing is therefore an optical and psychic experience: the artwork im- prints signs in me - signifiers and signifieds, words and things. Pauline d’Andigné’s work maneuvers precisely with impressions, in every sense of the term. Literally, first: on a colorful upholstery canvas, the artist pours bleach, which, infusing the cotton, generates random shapes, similar to large Rorschach tests. Then, on the dry canvas, she applies a silkscreen pattern reminiscent of industrial packaging or the tiles depicting emptiness in Photoshop. This careful work of canvas and patterns, surfaces and textures, reminiscent of Supports/Surfaces, especially Claude Viallat’s iterative va- riations, makes room for painting, diligently applied with a stencil to release clearer motifs. On the obtuse, the obvious. On the blurred, the clear. On the impure, the pure. On the smooth, roughness, sometimes lumpy. This realm of opposites creates a «floa- ting world,» as the Japanese call it, an uncertain space receiving clear forms that, soft and organic, are sometimes shaded by the passage of the airbrush, this machine that thickens, gives substance. Poetically, then: these impressions, which one would like to scale off like skins, leave on the retina and in the heart a feeling of hubris when impulse meets pulsation, when beauty is insulted, when brilliance is indifferent to measure, to optical seduction, as if cruelty and evanescence coexisted, gesture and wandering, a drunken boat and a throw of the dice, violence and boredom, momentum and pop, Hans Hartung and Roy Lichtenstein. As if. Because Pauline d’Andigné’s impressions are the indissoluble keys to «as if,» to semblance, contiguity, evocation, memory, and remembrance, the uneasy echo that makes the cord of mystery resonate within us. Seeing is never at rest. You must peel the world to access the real, which is an endless evasion. And all means are good: add, subtract, bleach, Photoshop, screen print, paint, staple, brutalize, lacerate, prepare, hazard, flay, batter, work, in the drunken boat, with all the means at hand. And here, Pauline d’Andigné rejoices. Moreover, the artist’s wall reliefs say nothing else. Behind the kitsch, despite the trash, and beyond the surfaces, there is a sovereign poetry. Under the visible dermis, the truth - impure. Under the vinyl, the beach - naked. Colin Lemoine