CHAPEL – LUND
Close your eyes and take the dive; Cathering Maria Chapel’s Escape presents us with a dream in an awakened state or perhaps a voyage into the unconscious: her new drawings are a plastic exploration of substance and absence, through the line and abstraction.
Escape – Echappée
Spaces without specific names or landmarks suggesting an underwater world, the botanical, the intense luminosity of heat, figures, occasionally fragmentary, exist by a simple contour or as cut-out silhouettes. Blended into the environment from which they are barely detached or on the contrary, placed on top, imposed, they evoke another way of being. The vision of these drawings leads to a form of heightened consciousness, where the sensorial reigns, where we see and feel with the body. Like the fresh transparency of water, a breeze’s caress, the smell of the earth after rain, the density of the Blue Hour or the nuances of an autumnal forest, Chapel’s new works bring about a sensation of being, of being more intensely. Like breathing whilst in a primal state, a transcendence, a fusion – where the ‘being’ is both body and spirit.
Matter and expression
Fields of dense or transparent colours, powerful gestures and minute touches, a pigment grain crystallizing, the shadow of matter gone through the paper: Chapel intimately knows paper and the fluid colourings of watercolour and ink. Matter and expression are one. The artist “allows it to come” in a free dialog where the luminous substance of pastel imposes itself at times to an evanescent surface. Recently, Chapel has started to cut out shapes in her drawings, creating silhouettes placed in the foreground of abstract ambiences. The notion of movement is strong and yet the dynamic radiating from the bodies strangely invites contemplation. Escape allows us to meet an elsewhere, whilst also being a little more here.
Publishing : Internal Visions
In his text Dream Anatomies written for the exhibition, the psychoanalyst Vincent Estellon questions “the mechanics of our internal visions”, the relation between dreams, words and images.
Background
Trained young in watercolour and painting by Luigi Tomaso d’Elia, Chapel’s career as an artist truly begins with a residency at the Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation (Connecticut) in 2006. Here, the subject of landscape which dominated up until then found a more abstract form where the contemplative meets the sensorial. If we have always identified in Chapel’s work an undoubted fascination for art at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, notably the Symbolists – the mystical dimension of an artist like Odilon Redon – the artist’s work is perfectly of her time. In th exhibitions Lands Glimpsed (2008) and Crossings (2010) the landscape was a ‘pretext’ but the body and the being in relation to physical and mental space were already in place. A parallel work with photography underlines her interest in planes, transparency and movement, and her very distinct palette. Chapel’s work has especially been shown in France, lately in the Female Landscapes show at Drawing Now 2011 – The Contemporary Drawing Fair,
Paris.