Brigit Ber

A graphic designer by training, Brigit Ber surreptitiously but surely opens a breach in the field of the image. Photography, video as much as drawing and engraving make up an imprint of life to be seen in the form of pseudo-serendipity. Brigit Ber's accidental discoveries are nothing less than a way to concretely achieve what she seeks. Automatic or systemic, the line is inscribed there translating the expression of a game of life. Whether light, digital, ink, gouache or thread, the line tests the trace and the trace. In this way, each series of Brigit Ber questions its manufacturing procedures until the expansion of a gesture. The first series, exhibited at the European Salon of Young Creation in Montrouge and at the Kunstpunkt Gallery in Berlin in 2002, then at the Satellite Gallery in Paris in 2003 in particular, show a set of "Navel" embroidered from a photographic corpus and drawn where chance has caused a screen mesh to meet with a thread of the same color. Later, it will be a polystyrene dance experienced in Marseille on the asphalt of a hotel that will take the photographer to explore the moving image. She meets jazz and composes visual pieces live with groups of musicians (VJing) to experience an immediate encounter with the public and dissect the images in order to play them in successive and rhythmic layers among others at the Elysée Montmartre (2005) , at Point Éphémère (2006), at Tarmac de la Villette, at the Forum des images in Paris, at La générale en manufacture in Sèvres (2008). Also, Brigit Ber never stops drawing and developing her “Bryophytes”. A series born from the meeting of a repetitive gesture made during the processing time of video images and a word found at random from the pages of a botanical work. A drawing proliferates, governed by an automatic gesture devoid of any referent or significant graphic model. The series extends to in-situ creations and then gives birth to the “Pebbles”, a return to the design on the motif, born of its encounter with the Breton coast. The line constructs the trace of a mineral seaside landscape. A void intervenes between observation and its translation. And it is particularly this interstice which nourishes the drawing here. (Galerie Catherine and André Hug, Paris in 2004; Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, Paris in 2003 and 2005) Today Brigit Ber questions the interweaving between gesture and image through ancient processes (gravure, cyanotype , drypoint, linocut, etching and woodcut) and contemporary (digital images and video). The "Tablecloths" where the line runs in the hollows of a bulgomme are like a child's play in the form of a computer cartography. The “trees”, photographic images translated by a manual drawing, create a pervasive network like a tree structure on the net. The “Worms”, natural hazards of the foreshore, become screens with strange reliefs. The "Bugs" transform printer errors or material disruptions into drawn embroidery. Finally, the “Still lifes” or the “Vanities” are so many exercises of accidental sagacity to bring together “curiosities” by their character both natural and manufactured. The artist collects, records, draws and prints a unique world where a glass table leg, a flower can meet a jellyfish, a cuttlebone, a fossil or a shell. (Réjane Louin Gallery, Locquirec).