Artissima, Sainte Anne Gallery, Turin, 2023

SH_23_5, 2023, acrylic and ink on canvas, 190x120 cm

SH_23_4, 2023, acrylic and ink on canvas, 190x120 cm

Untitled (saddle and float), 2023, horse saddle, glass float

H_23_1, 2023, acrylic and ink on canvas, 435x210 cm

Archive of Upcoming, group show curated by Altar, Berlin, 2023

photo 1,2: Sabine Zoltnere  photo 3: Doro Zinn 

Untitled (two horse saddles), 2023

photo Doro Zinn

H_22_series, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 300x190 cm

An End to a Sentence, a conversation between Alizée Gazeau and Lisa Deml, Häutung, 2023

https://www.contemporaryartlibrary.org

Lisa Deml: The impression that settled on my mind when I first came to see this series of painting in your studio was that of maturity. To me, these paintings are a very clear and condensed expression of different lines of thought and experimentation that you have been following for several years. They seem to have grown through practice and now coincide with your first solo exhibition. How is this exhibition situated in your artistic development, what does it mean to mark this point in time?

Alizée Gazeau: I consider this exhibition as an opportunity to end a first sentence. I invoke the notion of a sentence, but you could also say it marks the end of a first journey. My work is concerned with process itself and I have the feeling that I could develop the same idea further indefinitely. In this sense, the exhibition at gr_und is also a challenge for me to put an end to this process. Even though I would never say that this process is finished, I have reached a point when I can let it settle down and let go. When the work enters into an exhibition space, it does not belong to me anymore, it is not about me anymore—the work has to speak for itself, as Louise Bourgeois would insist. She says that an artwork has nothing to do with the artist; it has to stand for itself. I find this credo helpful to navigate the tension between the intimacy inherent in artworks and the extrovert nature of exhibitions.

This is not only your first solo exhibition but also the first time that you work in painting and to this scale. How did you arrive at this discipline and format of 200 x 300 cm? Would you say that it is the result of a measure of trust and confidence you have gained in the process?

I felt the need to not only engage the hand and the eye in the work process but to involve the whole body. It is a very physical process as I work on the floor and pull and place the hammock and the net on the canvas. And it is not only a physical experience for me in the production process but also for the viewer in front of the paintings. I wanted the paintings to be bigger than us, so that they create an immersive sensation that exceeds the human body.

(...)

What I find remarkable about your artistic practice is that all the components and materials that are involved in the production process retain a certain degree of agency and autonomy. This becomes most pronounced in the way in which you interact with the surface of the canvas. I know that you have given much thought to the notion of the surface—could you talk about what the surface is to you?

Of course, factually, paintings are two-dimensional, they have a flat surface. But I try to expand this understanding and to experiment with a sense of depth in my paintings. I want to create a sensation of the paintings coming towards you as you face them and dive into them. To me, this is also a reflection on what it takes to be an artist. At some point, I questioned myself and whether I am ready to be an artist or not. And an answer to this question is related to being ready to dive, to venture beyond the surface, and to confront memories and feelings of doubt and darkness. Producing these paintings was an almost physical experience of diving in and resurfacing to catch my breath. I think of these paintings as permeable surfaces. In a metaphorical way, they are questioning the idea of the skin, which is exposing you to the world at the same time as it is protecting you from it. To some extent, producing and showing paintings could be considered a healing process, not only for the artist but also for the people seeing them, as an instance of taking care.

As you mentioned the idea of the skin, this takes us to the title of the exhibition — Häutung. This notion of skinning seems to resonate on so many levels with your artistic practice, with the paintings themselves and their aesthetic impression, as well as with your work process and development as an artist. How do you relate the idea of Häutung to your practice?

As my work is concerned with the process itself, it is strongly connected to the concept of metamorphosis. For me, the process of printing relates to a continuous struggle to come to terms with the perpetual evolution and movement in which we are all implicated. Printing or imprinting are ancestral practices, ways to experience or own existence, for instance through handprints in stone or fossils. I had already produced prints with different found objects from the environment when I found the fishing net. It reminded me of fish skin itself—an interesting paradox, that the net mimics that which it is supposed to catch. The hammock is also a curious object that is allowing us to lie down and rest in nature, precisely by protecting us from the natural ground. Eventually, I moved away from natural elements towards tools that humans produced in order to enter into a conversation with what is called “nature”. In many ways, this is very similar to artistic practice, and to my artistic practice in particular. Both the hammock and the net are permeable and ambivalent between controlling or letting go. And once I have printed them on canvas, they become something else altogether and take on a second life.

The paintings offer a very immersive experience. Initially, I thought of them as cartographies but, rather than looking onto a landscape from above, they seem to draw one into the landscape, into a submerged perspective. Agnes Martin once said that, to her, painting was like going into the field of vision, as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean. I consider this to be a very fitting description of these paintings, an invitation to look beyond them.

This is one of my favourite quotes of Agnes Martin and it resonates strongly with me. Of course, the paintings have a physicality and presence but I hope that they, in a way, disappear behind themselves. Each painting holds a space that not only unfolds spatially but also temporally. Perhaps it is for this reason that I always work in series, to express a certain rhythm, a perpetual movement or evolution. While each painting is a work in and of itself, it is also part of a larger whole, of a score or sentence. In the exhibition at gr_und, I will continuously change the composition and chronology of the paintings so that the viewing experience will be different at every visit to the gallery. In this respect, my curatorial approach correlates with my artistic practice as they are both concerned with the process itself and with keeping this process alive. This might come out of a fear of completion and stasis, but I want to think of it as an openness towards fluidity. To me, fluidity is a good word to indicate a method of working rooted in humility, in acceptance of incompleteness, and a sense of reverence for the material at hand, for the unfolding process, for the shared space, and for the other artists and their work. Fluidity as a working method is especially important in collaborative projects, and the experience of curating the group show Off Water was exemplary in this respect. It felt very rewarding to work with all these artists, all women artists, I should say.

(...)

Untitled (phaéthon), 2021, horse saddle, cotton muslin fabric

Untitled (scales), 2022, pieces of an horse saddle

Untitled (Phaéthon); 2021, pieces of a saddle, cotton muslin

Where abscissa and ordinate axes meet, there are points of contact. From these landmarks, territories are created that continually communicate, interpenetrate and move away from each other. We approach these spaces, by creating zones punctuated by our meetings and exchanges. These places where worlds brush against each other are infrathin interfaces, membranes which embrace our interconnections.

First, there is the world’s vast space. From its maritime vibrations to the rhythm of the swell on its surface. There are telluric expanses pierced by roots and architectural perspectives. Within them, human and non-human skins deploy bodily and sensual conversations. The beauty of the notion of interface is that it proposes to reconsider the artwork as a surface accessible from its positive and negative sides. It opens up a space which escapes planarity, which draws its potentialities from a depth of field. As interfaces, artworks open worlds. Acting both as a screen and as a meeting place, they offer spaces of creation, invite us to penetrate and animate them with our interactions.

The idea of a permeability of interfaces is the key to this exhibition. The artists presented create spaces allowing for passages, for encounters. Their works call for a haptic experience.

Which is the surface, then, that caresses that of the other?

Within the exhibition space, itself an interface, the artists offer multiple approaches to this notion of permeability. When two hands move towards the surface of a plane, the skin itself becomes the surface through which the conversation with the world can take place. A dialectic thus opens, from the inner space towards an evoked place. The works build structures and create spaces of circulation and intimacy that resist us as much as they invite us in. In some, surfaces can be passed through in a vibratory and organic initiation. The artists stretch the plane of the exhibition towards an else-where that envelops us from the distant elsewhere in which it resides. The permeability of the presented surfaces allows us to envision that which, however infinitely distant, makes a step towards us. The interface can thus be seen as a potential for territorialization. The artists create immanent planes acting both as relics and potential futures, and these fragments scattered throughout the exhibition promise metamorphoses. The works gathered in this interior/exterior space formulate and offer access to intuitions which emerged from an embrace with the « surface’s deep essence ».

The exhibition proposes to envisage the depth of surfaces which we thought were impermeable. The artists reveal what lies beyond the surface of the works. Yet to caress the surface, one must be there, and stand prepared for an encounter. In order to open fundamental conversations and invite empathy towards species and worlds.

MPV_1, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 140x90 cm at Interfaces, or those who caress the surface, at Interface, Berlin, Germany, 2021

Untitled (boat cover), 2020, sewn pieces of an old boat cover

OE_5_19, OE_18_19, 2019, acrylic and ink on paper, 40x25 cm

Fondation Hartung Bergman, Antibes

Artissima, Sainte Anne Gallery, Turin, 2023

SH_23_5, 2023, acrylic and ink on canvas, 190x120 cm

SH_23_4, 2023, acrylic and ink on canvas, 190x120 cm

Untitled (saddle and float), 2023, horse saddle, glass float

H_23_1, 2023, acrylic and ink on canvas, 435x210 cm

Archive of Upcoming, group show curated by Altar, Berlin, 2023

photo 1,2: Sabine Zoltnere  photo 3: Doro Zinn 

Untitled (two horse saddles), 2023

photo Doro Zinn

H_22_series, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 300x190 cm

An End to a Sentence, a conversation between Alizée Gazeau and Lisa Deml, Häutung, 2023

https://www.contemporaryartlibrary.org

Lisa Deml: The impression that settled on my mind when I first came to see this series of painting in your studio was that of maturity. To me, these paintings are a very clear and condensed expression of different lines of thought and experimentation that you have been following for several years. They seem to have grown through practice and now coincide with your first solo exhibition. How is this exhibition situated in your artistic development, what does it mean to mark this point in time?

Alizée Gazeau: I consider this exhibition as an opportunity to end a first sentence. I invoke the notion of a sentence, but you could also say it marks the end of a first journey. My work is concerned with process itself and I have the feeling that I could develop the same idea further indefinitely. In this sense, the exhibition at gr_und is also a challenge for me to put an end to this process. Even though I would never say that this process is finished, I have reached a point when I can let it settle down and let go. When the work enters into an exhibition space, it does not belong to me anymore, it is not about me anymore—the work has to speak for itself, as Louise Bourgeois would insist. She says that an artwork has nothing to do with the artist; it has to stand for itself. I find this credo helpful to navigate the tension between the intimacy inherent in artworks and the extrovert nature of exhibitions.

This is not only your first solo exhibition but also the first time that you work in painting and to this scale. How did you arrive at this discipline and format of 200 x 300 cm? Would you say that it is the result of a measure of trust and confidence you have gained in the process?

I felt the need to not only engage the hand and the eye in the work process but to involve the whole body. It is a very physical process as I work on the floor and pull and place the hammock and the net on the canvas. And it is not only a physical experience for me in the production process but also for the viewer in front of the paintings. I wanted the paintings to be bigger than us, so that they create an immersive sensation that exceeds the human body.

(...)

What I find remarkable about your artistic practice is that all the components and materials that are involved in the production process retain a certain degree of agency and autonomy. This becomes most pronounced in the way in which you interact with the surface of the canvas. I know that you have given much thought to the notion of the surface—could you talk about what the surface is to you?

Of course, factually, paintings are two-dimensional, they have a flat surface. But I try to expand this understanding and to experiment with a sense of depth in my paintings. I want to create a sensation of the paintings coming towards you as you face them and dive into them. To me, this is also a reflection on what it takes to be an artist. At some point, I questioned myself and whether I am ready to be an artist or not. And an answer to this question is related to being ready to dive, to venture beyond the surface, and to confront memories and feelings of doubt and darkness. Producing these paintings was an almost physical experience of diving in and resurfacing to catch my breath. I think of these paintings as permeable surfaces. In a metaphorical way, they are questioning the idea of the skin, which is exposing you to the world at the same time as it is protecting you from it. To some extent, producing and showing paintings could be considered a healing process, not only for the artist but also for the people seeing them, as an instance of taking care.

As you mentioned the idea of the skin, this takes us to the title of the exhibition — Häutung. This notion of skinning seems to resonate on so many levels with your artistic practice, with the paintings themselves and their aesthetic impression, as well as with your work process and development as an artist. How do you relate the idea of Häutung to your practice?

As my work is concerned with the process itself, it is strongly connected to the concept of metamorphosis. For me, the process of printing relates to a continuous struggle to come to terms with the perpetual evolution and movement in which we are all implicated. Printing or imprinting are ancestral practices, ways to experience or own existence, for instance through handprints in stone or fossils. I had already produced prints with different found objects from the environment when I found the fishing net. It reminded me of fish skin itself—an interesting paradox, that the net mimics that which it is supposed to catch. The hammock is also a curious object that is allowing us to lie down and rest in nature, precisely by protecting us from the natural ground. Eventually, I moved away from natural elements towards tools that humans produced in order to enter into a conversation with what is called “nature”. In many ways, this is very similar to artistic practice, and to my artistic practice in particular. Both the hammock and the net are permeable and ambivalent between controlling or letting go. And once I have printed them on canvas, they become something else altogether and take on a second life.

The paintings offer a very immersive experience. Initially, I thought of them as cartographies but, rather than looking onto a landscape from above, they seem to draw one into the landscape, into a submerged perspective. Agnes Martin once said that, to her, painting was like going into the field of vision, as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean. I consider this to be a very fitting description of these paintings, an invitation to look beyond them.

This is one of my favourite quotes of Agnes Martin and it resonates strongly with me. Of course, the paintings have a physicality and presence but I hope that they, in a way, disappear behind themselves. Each painting holds a space that not only unfolds spatially but also temporally. Perhaps it is for this reason that I always work in series, to express a certain rhythm, a perpetual movement or evolution. While each painting is a work in and of itself, it is also part of a larger whole, of a score or sentence. In the exhibition at gr_und, I will continuously change the composition and chronology of the paintings so that the viewing experience will be different at every visit to the gallery. In this respect, my curatorial approach correlates with my artistic practice as they are both concerned with the process itself and with keeping this process alive. This might come out of a fear of completion and stasis, but I want to think of it as an openness towards fluidity. To me, fluidity is a good word to indicate a method of working rooted in humility, in acceptance of incompleteness, and a sense of reverence for the material at hand, for the unfolding process, for the shared space, and for the other artists and their work. Fluidity as a working method is especially important in collaborative projects, and the experience of curating the group show Off Water was exemplary in this respect. It felt very rewarding to work with all these artists, all women artists, I should say.

(...)

Untitled (phaéthon), 2021, horse saddle, cotton muslin fabric

Untitled (scales), 2022, pieces of an horse saddle

Untitled (Phaéthon); 2021, pieces of a saddle, cotton muslin

Where abscissa and ordinate axes meet, there are points of contact. From these landmarks, territories are created that continually communicate, interpenetrate and move away from each other. We approach these spaces, by creating zones punctuated by our meetings and exchanges. These places where worlds brush against each other are infrathin interfaces, membranes which embrace our interconnections.

First, there is the world’s vast space. From its maritime vibrations to the rhythm of the swell on its surface. There are telluric expanses pierced by roots and architectural perspectives. Within them, human and non-human skins deploy bodily and sensual conversations. The beauty of the notion of interface is that it proposes to reconsider the artwork as a surface accessible from its positive and negative sides. It opens up a space which escapes planarity, which draws its potentialities from a depth of field. As interfaces, artworks open worlds. Acting both as a screen and as a meeting place, they offer spaces of creation, invite us to penetrate and animate them with our interactions.

The idea of a permeability of interfaces is the key to this exhibition. The artists presented create spaces allowing for passages, for encounters. Their works call for a haptic experience.

Which is the surface, then, that caresses that of the other?

Within the exhibition space, itself an interface, the artists offer multiple approaches to this notion of permeability. When two hands move towards the surface of a plane, the skin itself becomes the surface through which the conversation with the world can take place. A dialectic thus opens, from the inner space towards an evoked place. The works build structures and create spaces of circulation and intimacy that resist us as much as they invite us in. In some, surfaces can be passed through in a vibratory and organic initiation. The artists stretch the plane of the exhibition towards an else-where that envelops us from the distant elsewhere in which it resides. The permeability of the presented surfaces allows us to envision that which, however infinitely distant, makes a step towards us. The interface can thus be seen as a potential for territorialization. The artists create immanent planes acting both as relics and potential futures, and these fragments scattered throughout the exhibition promise metamorphoses. The works gathered in this interior/exterior space formulate and offer access to intuitions which emerged from an embrace with the « surface’s deep essence ».

The exhibition proposes to envisage the depth of surfaces which we thought were impermeable. The artists reveal what lies beyond the surface of the works. Yet to caress the surface, one must be there, and stand prepared for an encounter. In order to open fundamental conversations and invite empathy towards species and worlds.

MPV_1, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 140x90 cm at Interfaces, or those who caress the surface, at Interface, Berlin, Germany, 2021

Untitled (boat cover), 2020, sewn pieces of an old boat cover

OE_5_19, OE_18_19, 2019, acrylic and ink on paper, 40x25 cm

Fondation Hartung Bergman, Antibes