Cellular material
“Colour is a cellular material that, like water or wind, has a lifetime of its own.” Georgia Russell’s complete analysis lies in this quest for movement within the very matter of the work, not its illustration however its inscription, its shaping in the very body of the fabric constituting the work. It is thus by making the paper palpitate that she succeeds in reworking the color into “cellular matter.”
“I minimize, I lacerate the paper and I play with the gradations of tones, punctuated by the motion of my incisions, during which the light seeps in,” explainsthe Scottish artist, settled in the Oise, north of Paris, with a uncommon readability and ease. “My work is the result of accumulations of cuttings. The repetition then creates vacancy and matter. These repetitive marks create a floor and an object in three dimensions.” Accumulation, repetition, slicing… Emptiness, matter, mild, floor… Transformation of colour into “cellular matter,” of vacancy into matter crossed by mild… There is something of transubstantiation in Georgia Russell’s artistic process.
The title of her latest work introduced at the Karsten Greve gallery (which has represented the artist, born in 1974, since 2010) is, on this regard, very evocative: Cells of Mild. By means of the incision of surfaces (canvas, paper, organza), painted in oil or acrylic, “she creates a mirage at the intersection of the actual and the illusory,” of the complete and the empty, the seen and the invisible.
Implementing in their interstices the permeability of matter, her honeycombed canvases, woven of colors and intertwined lights, evoke typically the pores and skin, “the natural cell, the dwelling tissue, the life” … typically its reflection by means of stained glass or the shimmer of water.
And the glance, caught by these shifting gradations of shade, to sail on this shimmering swell and to rush in these interstices; finely lacerated with the scalpel, the cracks of the work of Georgia Russell are doors half-opened on the void – this place beyond the surface of things, this immaterial area defined as “picture of the infinite” by Lucio Fontana. However if it is to the contemplation of this infinite and to a liberation “from the slavery of matter” that, between 1949 and 1968, the grasp of Concetto Spaziale invited together with his cut up canvases, it is extra a plastic quest that Georgia Russell seems to pursue. Enjoying with the optical confusion (pushed to its paroxysm with using the organza, this synthetic veil with the infinite iridescences, perpetually altering), the artist becomes master of the illusions reworking the tangible help of the canvas into an immaterial, shifting, and changing floor, attracting the look within the reels of its hypnotic oscillations to stroll there, to get lost there, or to be damaged there…
From 9th September to 16th October
Georgia Russell Exhibition – Cells of Mild
Galerie Karsten Greve – 5, rue Debelleyme, Paris III – www.galerie-karsten-greve.com
STÉPHANIE DULOUT
L’article <strong>& GEORGIA RUSSELL& </strong> est apparu en premier sur Galerie Joseph.
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