Deep Blue #16, 2021

Isthme  

"Painting is my breathing. It is vital to me. It acts like a force ... My painting is then intoxication, joy and grace like dizziness or torpor." Isthmus

Unframe Interview of Isthmus by Galerie Gaïa

Biography

Isthme, her artist name, works on the banks of the Loire, in Nantes, where she was born in December 1963.

She first studied Political Science in Bordeaux then in Planning and Management of Urban Projects in Paris. For ten years, she worked in several firms and worked in Paris with architects and landscapers.

During her studies in Bordeaux, she attended the exhibitions of the CAPC, former wine warehouses rehabilitated to accommodate important exhibitions of contemporary artists. Her first great artistic shocks were felt there during the monumental exhibition of Anselm Kieffer then that of Richard Long in 1985. She came out of it upset as much by the monumentality of Kiefer's works as by the purity of the forms of those of Long. In parallel to her professional activity, she took drawing and painting courses at the city of artists of Auvers-sur-Oise.

In 2000, she moved to live with her family in Montreal, Canada, where she obtained Canadian nationality. And, it was from that year that she definitely embarked on an artistic career, spending three years at the Saydie Bronfman School of Applied Arts in Montreal. From her first job, she keeps the passion and taste for space, clean lines, solids, voids, transparencies, opacities ...

The references that nourish his artistic work are broad and relate as much to the buildings of architects as

Mies Van Der Rohe for Less is more, by Japanese Tadao Ando for light as sculpture by Richard Serra or Dani Karavan for their minimalist interventions in public space, or even Color Field Painting (Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Charles Pollock) and contemporary painting by Lee U Fan, Korean artist, Pierre Soulages, Fabienne Verdier, Geneviève Asse without forgetting the inks of Gao XingJiang.

Isthme had its first exhibition in Montreal in 2003 with a dozen paintings and drawings. Between 2003 and 2007, she exhibited in several galleries and art centers in Montreal before returning to France to settle in Nantes, her hometown, and live near the ocean. She is passionate about offshore trips at the helm of sailboats. She sails whenever she can in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. She has to her credit several crossings of the Atlantic Ocean. Several series of paintings, Nuits en Mer, and drawings, Traversée or Estuaire, emerged from these oceanic moments.

After having been selected for several years in the Parisian salons of Garches and Réalités Nouvelles and many cultural art centers, she joined the Nantes gallery Gaia in 2018. This organizes a first individual exhibition for him in June-July 2019.

Isthmus is present in many private collections in North America and Europe.

The artistic process

"I do little sketch before launching myself on a canvas. However, I do not go blind. I always have a" vision-intuition "which allows me to pose a first draft on a large canvas. at least one meter sixty to get the widest, most lively and generous gesture possible. This first stage of the work involves going in search of a shape and its color. Here, the slow and long work of composition begins, of arrangement where each line must correspond to another, where the small detail is as important as the large one, where each color must find its proportion. continuous questioning is done day after day until a formal and colorful balance is imposed on the painting. Time has no hold. The challenge in this step is to preserve freshness, the spontaneity of the beginning.

Each painting is then an adventure which has its own history, its own memory. This "vision-intuition" finds its source in nature during a sea trip, a walk in the forest or in a large landscape and which has remained there, somewhere in my memory. I think of my series like Voyage en Argolida, Nuits en Mer or the one I'm currently working on Lying in the grass. The latter appeared last summer in the south of France on the banks of the Rhône during a moment in the grass watching the bursts of light between the leaves of the plane trees. So was born the desire

to transcribe on the canvas this light and with it, the enjoyment of this vision. In these canvases, it is the contrast of chiaroscuro that I am looking for, leaving large dark areas of the color bladder green next to bluish whites. But here, the light comes from the back of the painting, as in the stained glass windows ofes churches.

My pictorial objective is to succeed in sharing common sensations of nature or more original sensations (Nuits en Mer series) when it comes to moments lived at night at the helm of a boat. The painting is then a mirror: sensation of the artist-work-sensation of the spectator. This approach is very Matissean in the sense that the painting is an emergence, an opening towards something else, a beyond. The bluish whites of my works are an invitation to dive into them and even to fly through them. This invitation appeals to me.

To sum up, my current artistic work is both the result of a “vision-intuition” followed by a work of ordering colors and shapes. Without feeling, my painting appears to me as disembodied, without thought, it floats. If I wanted to join an artistic movement, I would say that my work is moving towards a sensitive abstraction. "

Isthmus

Isthme's approach is entirely balanced between sensitive improvisation and intellectual rigor, between purely plastic construction and the thrill of a natural vision transposed by poetry, between suggestion and pictorial evidence, between abstraction and allusion to an elliptical reality.

Collages, paintings on paper, large format canvases, designed in diptychs and polyptychs until they constitute series that come to be seen in the beautiful architectures where Isthmus exhibits them, become the medium of a single and same approach. The collages are assembled and juxtaposed like "fragments of nature", of a nature which would be reconstituted here in an unexpected and personal order, by a vision closer to the sensitive reality than a faithful restitution of the world. The tears in the papers introduce chance and dazzling, even though the thoughtful position of each piece of the collage and the dynamic balance of the composition seem to be Isthme's main focus.

Isthme plays daring chords, apparently complementary chords but cleverly diverted and enriched by unexpected tones. The colors are carried by a very free writing according to a fairly rational approach to chromaticism and for an innovative and personal proposal of harmony and plastic rhythm.

In his abstract and radical paintings, which seem to have neither top nor bottom, it is the spatial sensation that dominates, and the dispersion of the colored elements on the surface, whatever the extent, suggests that we are in front of a detail or a fragment of an even greater work. Writing, like fragments of a discourse of colored shapes crossing the surface, evokes sounds that resonate in the vast space of memory.

All these forays into the different techniques and the fields of creation, sensibly but methodically, explored constitute a new and original work where the intellectual will reigns but where the hand is always present.

Daniel Lacomme