A Michel Foucault book roughly the size of a cinder block looms atop a coffee table in Emilie Duval’s studio. Some pages appear to be tagged with Post-It notes, and the corners of the book sweep upward, clear signs that the book by the French philosopher is being read rather than left out for show. The book is about the only thing in the artist’s Museum District space that looks worn. Duval is a painter, but the customary studio smears and detritus are nowhere to be found. A work in progress hangs on one wall. And her materials are all neatly organized.
In contrast, Duval’s art hanging throughout the space appears to run contrary to the tidiness of her workspace. On first glance, her pieces — typically acrylic with ink and some collage elements — untie a sense of chaos: a mix of black-and-white background figures with brighter geometric forms and pieces of old texts pasted into the mix. But look longer, and a methodology begins to emerge amid the layers of colors and figures. Duval is fascinated by chaos and order; the successes and failures of societal systems. The canvases find her making sense of cultures in flux.
“When I have an idea, I write about it,” she says. “I start to gather photos. It becomes like researching a book.”
New structures
Her most recent canvases bear the imprint of the past year. While some artists have found the pandemic to be stifling, Duval’s work exploded during lockdown. A recent exhibition at Heidi Vaughan Fine Art — “The Order of the Simulation” — featured 11 new works, all undertaken during 2020. And a new piece hanging in her studio suggests a continuation of that work.
Many of her works begin with a black and white form representing a building. These foundational spaces almost retreat to the background as shadows: the U.S. Capitol building in “Structural Possibilities,” Russia’s Star City in “Structural Star and Dust.” Elsewhere, she uses a news building and a cruise ship. On one canvas, she pastes in the Coliseum in Rome.
“I’m interested in these spaces,” she says. “Arenas and places with a lot of density, people all together.”
Her works also often have snippets of binary code embedded in them, as well as representations of motherboards. Sometimes she’ll slip in a snippet of a text that has caught her attention, like “De La Democratie en Amerique” by Alexis de Tocqueville.
Throughout the canvases, lines serve as neural networks combining all the elements placed around the canvas. And the placement is done with care. Duval suggests “it’s like a Rubik’s Cube, if you make one move, it affects all the sides.”
She’s intrigued by philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia: cultural locations that exist as worlds within worlds. They can be places of commonality and also adversarial agitation. For Duval, the use of these spaces doesn’t serve as pointed political commentary but rather a source of meditation about the ways in which we organize ourselves. “The impacts of social organization on our physical selves,” she says. “And the ways reality can be distorted.”
Vaughan adds, “They’re super observed but not judgmental at all.”
Perception of time
Duval was born and raised in Paris and was drawn to art early.
“I was always painting,” she says. “And I was always processing. Even as a kid, there were things in my head I couldn’t really express with words. So drawing and painting were the only way I could express them.”
She moved to Texas from her native France more than 15 years ago. She had her first solo exhibition 10 years ago and has shown regularly here since. The tidiness of her studio space obscures just how often she’s at work.
“I like to be alone,” she says. “And I like working alone, without sharing a studio space. There are no interruptions. I work at night, and I also start early.”
The in-progress canvas affixed to her wall suggests a variation on past work, with the early geometric shape of a satellite beginning to form at the center of the piece. Having touched on social and governmental institutions and also modern constructs like cryptocurrency, space is a logical place to visit. Often, looking at her work, it appears we are slowly catching up to where Duval was years earlier. Her “The Island” series included works that touched on energy, government and borders: After a disastrous energy crisis earlier this year, the pieces feel almost prescient.
Not surprisingly, she was one of the first — if not the first — Houston-based artist to make a significant NFT (nonfungible token) sale to a local collector whose wall space had no remaining room for more physical paintings.
Looking at the new piece, “Satellite of My Consciousness,” is striking for how it contrasts her completed works. Without the neural networks, without the collage images of buildings and texts, it resembles a skeleton exposed. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity has been on her mind while working on it. And, naturally, time.
“Our perceptions of time, time in motion,” she says. “Our paranoias about time. That’s where my mind is right now.”
andrew.dansby@chron.com
"artist" - Google News
May 10, 2021 at 04:27PM
https://ift.tt/3xZ70SS
Houston artist Emilie Duval found inspiration during lockdown - Houston Chronicle
"artist" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2FwLdIu
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Houston artist Emilie Duval found inspiration during lockdown - Houston Chronicle"
Post a Comment