WATER AS A COMMON THREAD IN THE WORK OF ALIZÉE GAZEAU by Laure Martin-Poulet
(...) Alizée Gazeau develops in this way a poetic and meditative body of work, leaving ample room for experimentation and for chance. She seeks to offer the viewer the freedom of an appropriation, a personal immersion, based on the following postulation: ‘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’ (interview with the artist by Lisa Deml, Berlin, January 2023). With this, Alizée Gazeau echoes the credo of Louise Bourgeois, who belongs to her personal pantheon of artists alongside Agnes Martin: ‘A work of art has nothing to do with the artist, a work of art has to stand by itself’ (Louise Bourgeois, ‘Destruction of the Father. Reconstruction of the Father’, 1998, p.168).
From the start, she approaches the question of landscape in painting and drawing through the bias of abstraction and metaphor. In 2016, in her very first series of works, aptly entitled ‘Incipit’, Alizée Gazeau adopted the technique of collage, which she appreciates for the freedom it entails. Using as backgrounds old, very classic seascapes dating back to her classes at Ivry, upon which she arranged shapes cut from silk paper, she composes a fragmented landscape, seemingly shattered. Exploring the question of horizon, of the island as an imaginary utopian place, she created, during a trip to Cuba in 2016, a series of collages titled ‘Lines and Forms on Cuban Walls’. Upon her return, the reading of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, inspired a new series of collages presented in her first solo exhibition, in October 2017 at Bubenberg Gallery in Paris, with the title ‘Heureux qui comme Ulysse’ (Happy who like Ulysses). From Homer’s story, she extracted words that she transposed into coloured figures on fabric, affixed to the canvas, forming an archipelago of sorts. Earlier that same year, during a stay at La Baule, Alizée Gazeau created ‘Silence and Noise’, a work composed of a glass plate with collages of abstract silk paper shapes, yet again evoking the idea of islands, and a frame on which hangs white silk gauze. She made it the subject of an ins- tallation-performance, of which she has preserved the memory in a series of black and white photographs. On the beach, Alizée Gazeau moved the glass plate, and the shadows of the collages were cast onto the silk sail attached to the frame planted in the sand. This was an important moment, which she remembers: ‘For the first time, I felt I could trust my intuition, and escape the convention of painting, the collage’*. This initiatory experience continues in other works, by summoning the action of natural elements, she incorporates the random, the unexpected.
This way, in February 2020 in La Baule, Alizée Gazeau, while seeking out an idea for an invitation card, made a cyanotype of a fishing net, which she printed on canvas, before affixing it to a salvaged wooden pallet and placing it at the water’s edge to photograph it. The waves suddenly swept away the work, transforming it into a raft adrift, like the aftermath of a shipwreck. On the spot, she transformed this incident into an improvised performance, capturing it in a series of photographs titled ‘If a clod be washed away by the sea (after John Donne)’. In an unsettling coincidence, just a few weeks later, the Covid pandemic upended the entire world.
But let us return to spring 2018, when a significant turning point occurred on the occasion of a first artist residency on the island of Ikaria in the Aegean Sea: the transition from collage to imprint. Embracing this ancestral technique, the artist made there her very first imprints with cotton fabrics soaked in pigments collected on site and mixed with acrylic and water from the river Halaris, which gives the series its name. She continued in this new direction with other works made by using olive branches, with the title ‘OE_18’. These were made during her residency at the Hartung Bergman Foundation in Antibes in September 2018, where Alizée Gazeau found material for her art in the surrounding nature, a source of inspiration for the work of Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman, with invaluable encouragement and support from Thomas Schlesser.
Continually striving to go beyond the ‘surface of things’* in a fluid gesture involving not only the eye and hand, but the entire body, Alizée Gazeau explores new practices and materials, while remaining in the register of abstraction, which grows in corporality without losing its lyricism.
In 2019, the discovery of an abandoned fishing net in Le Croisic reminded her of the drawings made in preparation for the first edition of the journal PAN, ‘Horizons’, in 2018, in which she attempted to transcribe the concepts of rhizome and immanence set forth by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This modest everyday object, emblematic of the maritime world, becomes her paintbrush as well as an old hammock made of braided rope. Since then, she has begun creating different series of paintings in ever-larger formats, skillfully balanced between control and letting go. The process is always the same for all of them: she plunges a net or hammock into a first bassin of water and acrylic paint before placing it on the surface of the canvas on the studio floor, moving it around, then letting it dry and removing the net or hammock. She enjoys this ‘moment of revelation, which is always a surprise’*. Sometimes she starts again, using the same process, adding one or more extra layers until she is satisfied with the result, as testified by some of her paintings from the series ‘SH_23’ from 2023.
More recently, alongside painting, she started exploring the field of installation and sculpture. In a solo exhibition in Tokyo in 2022, she presented ‘Untitled (Boat cover)’, a piece made in 2020 using an old family cotton boat cover, cut into diamond shapes and sewn back together. Hung from light wooden structures with the light passing through moth holes, this canvas takes on the appearance of a map of the stars. In January 2023, in her exhibition ‘Häutung’ (moulting) at Gr_und gallery in Berlin, where she now lives and works, she showed ‘Phaethon’, a sculpture from 2022, composed of a horse saddle and a cotton sail also sewn from diamond-shaped pieces. With an unprecedented sexual connotation, this work offers a striking contrast to the large monochrome imprint paintings from 2022 that fill most of the space.
In Venice, where water is omnipresent, she feels in her element. On the occasion of the 60th Biennale, Alizée Gazeau is exhibiting a series of acrylic and ink paintings on canvas in shades of red, made during her residency organised by Lapis Lazuli: artE, an art consulting firm that has been promoting young artists since 2023. She
is presenting it as an installation titled ‘Océanicité’. While the term (Oceanicity) references the degree to which the climate is influenced by the sea, for the artist it has a more personal and more ambitious dimension: ‘I have associated this climatic concept with a more intimate concept, that of empathy. The degree to which an individual is affected by the environment, how my interactions in the world, my encounters, my exchanges affect my emotions as well as my paintings. Red is the colour of life, it is an organic, vibrating colour, I wanted to create a series of works where the viewer would have a sense of diving beneath the surface’*. Additionally, in keeping with the broadening of her field of artistic production, she is presenting two sculptures, of which one of the constituent elements, old glass floats used for fishing, again alludes to the maritime world. Here is what Alizée Gazeau says of them: ‘Freed from the mesh, they gain a highly feminine appearance. I brought them with me to the Lido, I spent an afternoon throwing them into the sea and fetching them back from the waves. Charged up from this performative moment, archived in a series of film photos, I brought them back to the studio where I had the idea to construct nets and create sculptures made from the assembly of these two objects. I cut from the cotton canvas thin strips of fabric that I tied together to make small nets, in which these glass balls are hung. One of these sculptures pays tribute to one of my favourite sculptures by Eva Hesse, ‘Ohne Titel’, from 1966*.
Alizée Gazeau’s work unfolds in successive waves, in a tireless quest for new expressive horizons. With persistent humility, she relentlessly explores and reinvents herself in a form of continuity, taking risks; this is the mark of a true artist.
*: quotations from an interview with the author and the artist in Paris on 22 December 2023
Océanicité (Oceanicity), 2023, Installation, acrylic, ink, pigments, glass, fabric
WATER AS A COMMON THREAD IN THE WORK OF ALIZÉE GAZEAU by Laure Martin-Poulet
(...) Alizée Gazeau develops in this way a poetic and meditative body of work, leaving ample room for experimentation and for chance. She seeks to offer the viewer the freedom of an appropriation, a personal immersion, based on the following postulation: ‘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’ (interview with the artist by Lisa Deml, Berlin, January 2023). With this, Alizée Gazeau echoes the credo of Louise Bourgeois, who belongs to her personal pantheon of artists alongside Agnes Martin: ‘A work of art has nothing to do with the artist, a work of art has to stand by itself’ (Louise Bourgeois, ‘Destruction of the Father. Reconstruction of the Father’, 1998, p.168).
From the start, she approaches the question of landscape in painting and drawing through the bias of abstraction and metaphor. In 2016, in her very first series of works, aptly entitled ‘Incipit’, Alizée Gazeau adopted the technique of collage, which she appreciates for the freedom it entails. Using as backgrounds old, very classic seascapes dating back to her classes at Ivry, upon which she arranged shapes cut from silk paper, she composes a fragmented landscape, seemingly shattered. Exploring the question of horizon, of the island as an imaginary utopian place, she created, during a trip to Cuba in 2016, a series of collages titled ‘Lines and Forms on Cuban Walls’. Upon her return, the reading of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, inspired a new series of collages presented in her first solo exhibition, in October 2017 at Bubenberg Gallery in Paris, with the title ‘Heureux qui comme Ulysse’ (Happy who like Ulysses). From Homer’s story, she extracted words that she transposed into coloured figures on fabric, affixed to the canvas, forming an archipelago of sorts. Earlier that same year, during a stay at La Baule, Alizée Gazeau created ‘Silence and Noise’, a work composed of a glass plate with collages of abstract silk paper shapes, yet again evoking the idea of islands, and a frame on which hangs white silk gauze. She made it the subject of an ins- tallation-performance, of which she has preserved the memory in a series of black and white photographs. On the beach, Alizée Gazeau moved the glass plate, and the shadows of the collages were cast onto the silk sail attached to the frame planted in the sand. This was an important moment, which she remembers: ‘For the first time, I felt I could trust my intuition, and escape the convention of painting, the collage’*. This initiatory experience continues in other works, by summoning the action of natural elements, she incorporates the random, the unexpected.
This way, in February 2020 in La Baule, Alizée Gazeau, while seeking out an idea for an invitation card, made a cyanotype of a fishing net, which she printed on canvas, before affixing it to a salvaged wooden pallet and placing it at the water’s edge to photograph it. The waves suddenly swept away the work, transforming it into a raft adrift, like the aftermath of a shipwreck. On the spot, she transformed this incident into an improvised performance, capturing it in a series of photographs titled ‘If a clod be washed away by the sea (after John Donne)’. In an unsettling coincidence, just a few weeks later, the Covid pandemic upended the entire world.
But let us return to spring 2018, when a significant turning point occurred on the occasion of a first artist residency on the island of Ikaria in the Aegean Sea: the transition from collage to imprint. Embracing this ancestral technique, the artist made there her very first imprints with cotton fabrics soaked in pigments collected on site and mixed with acrylic and water from the river Halaris, which gives the series its name. She continued in this new direction with other works made by using olive branches, with the title ‘OE_18’. These were made during her residency at the Hartung Bergman Foundation in Antibes in September 2018, where Alizée Gazeau found material for her art in the surrounding nature, a source of inspiration for the work of Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman, with invaluable encouragement and support from Thomas Schlesser.
Continually striving to go beyond the ‘surface of things’* in a fluid gesture involving not only the eye and hand, but the entire body, Alizée Gazeau explores new practices and materials, while remaining in the register of abstraction, which grows in corporality without losing its lyricism.
In 2019, the discovery of an abandoned fishing net in Le Croisic reminded her of the drawings made in preparation for the first edition of the journal PAN, ‘Horizons’, in 2018, in which she attempted to transcribe the concepts of rhizome and immanence set forth by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This modest everyday object, emblematic of the maritime world, becomes her paintbrush as well as an old hammock made of braided rope. Since then, she has begun creating different series of paintings in ever-larger formats, skillfully balanced between control and letting go. The process is always the same for all of them: she plunges a net or hammock into a first bassin of water and acrylic paint before placing it on the surface of the canvas on the studio floor, moving it around, then letting it dry and removing the net or hammock. She enjoys this ‘moment of revelation, which is always a surprise’*. Sometimes she starts again, using the same process, adding one or more extra layers until she is satisfied with the result, as testified by some of her paintings from the series ‘SH_23’ from 2023.
More recently, alongside painting, she started exploring the field of installation and sculpture. In a solo exhibition in Tokyo in 2022, she presented ‘Untitled (Boat cover)’, a piece made in 2020 using an old family cotton boat cover, cut into diamond shapes and sewn back together. Hung from light wooden structures with the light passing through moth holes, this canvas takes on the appearance of a map of the stars. In January 2023, in her exhibition ‘Häutung’ (moulting) at Gr_und gallery in Berlin, where she now lives and works, she showed ‘Phaethon’, a sculpture from 2022, composed of a horse saddle and a cotton sail also sewn from diamond-shaped pieces. With an unprecedented sexual connotation, this work offers a striking contrast to the large monochrome imprint paintings from 2022 that fill most of the space.
In Venice, where water is omnipresent, she feels in her element. On the occasion of the 60th Biennale, Alizée Gazeau is exhibiting a series of acrylic and ink paintings on canvas in shades of red, made during her residency organised by Lapis Lazuli: artE, an art consulting firm that has been promoting young artists since 2023. She
is presenting it as an installation titled ‘Océanicité’. While the term (Oceanicity) references the degree to which the climate is influenced by the sea, for the artist it has a more personal and more ambitious dimension: ‘I have associated this climatic concept with a more intimate concept, that of empathy. The degree to which an individual is affected by the environment, how my interactions in the world, my encounters, my exchanges affect my emotions as well as my paintings. Red is the colour of life, it is an organic, vibrating colour, I wanted to create a series of works where the viewer would have a sense of diving beneath the surface’*. Additionally, in keeping with the broadening of her field of artistic production, she is presenting two sculptures, of which one of the constituent elements, old glass floats used for fishing, again alludes to the maritime world. Here is what Alizée Gazeau says of them: ‘Freed from the mesh, they gain a highly feminine appearance. I brought them with me to the Lido, I spent an afternoon throwing them into the sea and fetching them back from the waves. Charged up from this performative moment, archived in a series of film photos, I brought them back to the studio where I had the idea to construct nets and create sculptures made from the assembly of these two objects. I cut from the cotton canvas thin strips of fabric that I tied together to make small nets, in which these glass balls are hung. One of these sculptures pays tribute to one of my favourite sculptures by Eva Hesse, ‘Ohne Titel’, from 1966*.
Alizée Gazeau’s work unfolds in successive waves, in a tireless quest for new expressive horizons. With persistent humility, she relentlessly explores and reinvents herself in a form of continuity, taking risks; this is the mark of a true artist.
*: quotations from an interview with the author and the artist in Paris on 22 December 2023
Océanicité (Oceanicity), 2023, Installation, acrylic, ink, pigments, glass, fabric