Maëlle Labussière

ince leaving the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1991, Maëlle Labussière has started working on the repetition of the trace and the line, with a strong colored bias and in a problematic of the total recovery of its support whether canvas or paper. Her interest leads her towards an obviousness of doing and visual immediacy. His research is based on the systematic exploitation of an extremely simple process. His paintings, like his drawings or even installations and books, are constructed by juxtapositions and superimpositions of colored traces, deposited by the passage of a tool, each time chosen and manufactured in relation to its support. They restore without affecting the memory of the execution of these simple and repeated actions. Its exploration leads it to invest in various supports for an implementation each time renewed. Despite the systematic marking method that it advocates, this openness to diverse media generates multiple plastic proposals, innovative in the asceticism of its pictorial process. “I am a painter. My paintings, usually large in size, reproduce simple and repeated actions. The tools are adapted to the material depending on whether it is canvas, plexiglass, aluminum or paper. The colored trace returned by the tool is linked to the format imposed by the support worked on the ground… For books, the relationship to time and to the body is different. I design a book in stretched space-time, associated with the infinite unfolding of the pages turned one after the other. Here also the tool and the material (pen, roller, brush, gouache oil ink, etc.) are chosen according to the paper support depending on whether it is absorbent or not, virgin or lined. The traces can show through, spill over from the front to the back of the sheet, duplicate by the absorption of the support. The daily interventions repeated and renewed page after page give substance to the book which seems to unfold despite its small size. The diversity of supports and dimensions, the variety of tools and colors, open up multiple spaces for me to replay the line. »- Mäelle Labussière, March 16, 2011