PICANDET – VALLOIS
REALITY SUSPENSORS
You have travelled through a mirror, to the other side of things. Yet, not somewhere else. See, not everything is unknown and some fi gures are even familiar. Expect to feel things that were once shapeless. Lucie Picandet has created them, alone, last Spring, while time had stopped. In her paintings we see worlds blossoming under bell-jars; among them, hybrid beings that seem to be the result of a union between two species, suspended clothing inhabited by absent bodies, interference and most probably some inconsistencies. The fi rst of them is perhaps that Lucie Picandet wants to represent what cannot be represented while accepting to mourn the visible.
The artist explores this paradox through two enigmatic experiences. First, she is interested in esoterism that plunges the people who are confronted with it into interstitial worlds that science still struggles to explain. During these periods of time, their senses greatly increase. Their emotions take shape, they let themselves be touched before escaping as reason returns to them. Then the artist discovers the Tibetan Book of the Dead which describes the path of physically dead beings: forty-seven days during which their consciousness tries to pass through various stages in the hope of reaching Nirvana. It is then a question of fluidifying one’s vision of the world in order to extricate oneself from the cycle of reincarnations, to abandon all judgments and with it, a part of oneself.
Lucie Picandet is a painter, but in the end her gaze never ceases to rest on what cannot be seen. While she studied theology, the question of the materiality of belief already animated her. When she moved to the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, the artist developed a richer inner life, giving rise to a new passion for mystical experiences and their stories.
Today, she wants, even more, to materialize feelings and abstractions. Her paintings have thus become open doors to those mental spaces in which worlds in gestation in bubbles are topped by hybrid beasts with ambitions that are too little clear. They demand a refl exive plasticity but are also refuges for those who suffer from solitude. Lucie Picandet plays with codes and semantic. She can be inspired by orthodox icons or by the agents of contemporary imagination that are the influencers of social networks. Here, the contours of the invisible are shaped as if it were a palpable object and things once tangible slide at will from one form to another. The boundaries between the real and the immaterial, the rational and the mystical are challenged, laid down on canvas and diluted in the oil that the artist uses for the first time in her work. So much so that it seems that Lucie Picandet sees through worlds.