Linda Sanchez
Les écarts serrésfrom September 1 to September 25 - 2018
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© Frederic Garcia Starface
Les écarts serrés
1st September - 25 September 2018
Vernissage - Saturday 1st September, from 3pm until 8pm
Linda Sanchez is a solidly equipped artist. And I’m not just talking about the instruments, utensils and other manufactured or invented devices she uses to produce her works. I’m talking rather about the language apparatus that serves as a script - as one would speak of foundations in the construction industry - for the totality of her production. Because structurally speaking, the sculptures and objects from this artist born in 1983 are readily interpreted like so many notes of an unknown musical score. Also, if the landscape offered by the gathering of her sculptures seems at first somewhat lackluster or voiceless - an impression probably linked to the uniform, pale and waxy palette of her sculptures - it is on the contrary in front of a discreetly talkative community humming with a thousand stories and as many meanings as we ourselves hold. Take for example this work balanced in the first room of the exhibition. "It's a comma," assures the artist, the result of a powerful but less definitive gesture than a period, which consisted of removing a teardrop-shaped piece of clay from a compact block. This sculpture, as discreet in space as the punctuation in a sentence, serves as a pause after the production of its predecessor presented in the second room. This freestanding, human-scale piece is entitled Le Lacet (The Lace), “which also reminded me of the verb lacerate" explains Linda Sanchez in a spontaneous Lacanian thought, and is a technical feat. Imagine a big mound of clay sliced with a wire. The same thing with a mound of butter. Imagine now that this mound is almost two meters high and that the cutting wire is proportional to this giant mound of clay. It is this smaller portion, this thin slice created in the middle of the material that the artist molded and extracted. "It's a materialized fault" she sums up with a certain sense of multiple meanings. Reversibility, the notions of top and bottom, fold and refold, fullness and hollow are part of the lexical field of this studio artist who presents here a collaboration with the artist Baptiste Croze with whom in recent years she has shared work and a life "in porosity", as she nicely puts it. And so this new family of sculptures coated and then sanded to the bone is rightly seen as the very material manifestation of permeability. Called Les Sourdines (The Mutes), their scraped, snowy coat conceals DIY and construction tools which are actually minimized by this double operation of masking/undressing. The Mutes reveal a topography where each object is composed of ridges, lines and hollows. The aluminum food trays are smoothed out by hand in a long and tedious effort which contradicts the brutality and speed of industrial production and also reveals their share of surprises. From a distance, we could take them for dented Rorschach tests. Close up, they sometimes play the tautological card -even when cleanly flattened the initial shape retains its proportions of simple fish - or on the contrary, conserve their effects when, thanks to patient and careful unfolding, an outgrowth is revealed that the machine had only covered up. The entire exhibition is a tribute to the plasticity of language and matter. Entitled Les Ecarts serrés, it functions as an immense oxymoron. Where we enter together with Linda Sanchez into the thick of things, when they very often cling to surface effects. Where we first believe in a world mapped out of autistic and mute objects that finally reveal themselves to be quite talkative.