Galerie Le Corridor is delighted to present Traverser, an exhibition featuring works by Florence Grundeler and Michel Rey. A slow journey through imaginary, real or metaphorical landscapes.
Florence Grundeler’s creative process begins with materials: cotton, tarlatan, paper, copper, ash, ink, thread and, more recently, denim. Serendipity, that fruitful element of chance, plays an important role. With a free, random gesture, the artist confronts the fragility, hardness and unpredictable permeability of the support. She stitches canvases or papers with thread, impregnates them with ink, engraves plates with drypoint. She explores the repetition of forms, their minute variations. Tones are neutral, brown, black, white, blue. Silence, emptiness and, paradoxically, a density of detail that invites wandering contemplation. A series of small formats from the Jean Palimpseste project – landscapes on fragments of worn jeans – is exhibited for the first time. A further subtle illustration of the artist’s incessant research into the sensitive experience of time and imprint.
Michel Rey’s photographs, from the series, entre-deux, Camargue, evoke the in-between, indecisive spaces of the Camargue, an unstable, shifting territory where separation is never far from rupture. The intention is not documentary, yet for those who know this territory, it is its very essence that is captured here. Mineral colors, from extinguished sand to intense ochre, from sky blue to blue black, horizontal lines of force, infinite spaces. The human presence is played out indirectly through signs, purely graphic vestiges that enter into tension with the horizontality of the three elements: earth, sea and sky. The composition is rigorously thought out and mastered, with an assumed pictorial quality. It draws its aesthetic inspiration from past Christian iconography by inverting its values: the sky is dark, the earth is light. This metaphorical dimension creates a sense of strangeness, a blurring effect between reality and fiction. While maintaining a distance from things, it invites us to shift our gaze.
