Night Landscapes Illuminations
Anna Pricoupenko
Exhibition project by Manon Béranger
« Such a language 'would be a language of which (the philosopher) would not be the organizer, words that would not assemble themselves, that would unite through him by the natural interweaving of their meanings, by the hidden traffic of metaphor, what matters no longer being the manifest meaning of each word and each image, but the latent relationships, the affinities implied in their shifts and exchanges' ».
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, VI.
The landscape is considered as the principle of a writing of painting. A painting that would be an equation between several approaches to representation
- pictorial space
- photography
- writing.
Sequences of similar views introduce the temporal dimension, the off-frame of the image, the outline of a fiction. This fiction is the unknown in the equation.
The title "Illuminations", the name of a collection of poems by Arthur Rimbaud, speaks of a vision, it is a matter of light, but also of night - dream or reality? The perception of a beyond the visible, an inner world, placed in abyme, in adequacy with the space surrounding us in a state of heightened consciousness. Through the darkness that allows stars to appear, until then invisible, each person can imagine their own interpretation, a story, a buried memory.
Anna Pricoupenko questions the formation of the gaze, moving toward an introspective approach, by representing transitional landscapes in which the idea of waiting and becoming is central. These places, caught between reality and fiction, become true fragments of narration, in a cinematic spirit. The artist pays close attention to the framing of the landscapes she depicts and to their positioning within the pictorial space. She thus expresses a meditative relationship to her works, sensitive and experimental, induced by the systematic repetition of images. Her research has also led her to explore the relationship between the body, architecture and landscape, as evidenced by her series Skin, Weak Force, Space Oddity, and her collaborations with contemporary dance and performance.
Anna Pricoupenko has also created works in direct dialogue with urban and architectural space, in set design at the Musée Galliera, in the creation of murals under the aegis of the Fondation Cartier with Marie-Claude Beaud, a painted wall entitled Voyelles in the 12th arrondissement of Paris initiated by the Direction de l'Aménagement Urbain de la Ville de Paris, and a silk-screened glass façade as part of the construction of a residential building by the architecture firm Brunet Saunier in the Seine Rive Gauche district. Words inscribe themselves naturally into the international-style architecture, as substitutes for the arabesque ironwork of Haussmann-era balconies. They are the projection of intimate perspectives into the often dehumanised space of the city. Words and their power are omnipresent in Anna Pricoupenko's work. They are above all a raw material in keeping with her visual research, poetically articulating the artist's series.
Each of these works originates from a photograph of a nocturnal landscape, which is then reinterpreted and reworked through successive readings and the addition of materials evolving under the artist's hand and the viewer's eye. The landscape transcends its motif, giving free rein to a plurality of interpretations. Each composition echoes its title, drawn from Arthur Rimbaud's poetry collection Illuminations, offering a symbiosis between colour nuances, the construction of the landscape — physical as well as mental — and the verse to which it is linked.
- 1 large-format painting, acrylic on canvas, 150 × 200 cm
- 5 paintings, acrylic on canvas, 150 × 150 cm
- 25 collages on paper, 4 series, 30 × 40 cm
- 1 video
- 1 performance, on the evening of the opening or scheduled at specific moments during the exhibition period - 1 audio work: Verklärte Nacht by Arnold Schönber, the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven, the Nocturnes by Chopin.