[EXHIBITION TEXT] Capriccio cherche comtesse

“Capriccio cherche comtesse”, solo exhibition of Sarah Tritz at Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris, 15th March-17th May 2008.

Text written on the occasion and published on the flyer :
The works of Sarah Tritz present themselves as composite wholes shaped by an original rhythm that is each time particular to them. This rhythm is close to a mood, like an internal music, and serves to organise – from the inside – a play of forms that on leaving this codified arrangement appear to return to their initial obscurity. From the outside, the group struggles to agree; nothing moves. Our eyes hesitate, stumble, shocked by certain presumed affinities. Elements even seem to clash. From the inside, they all take their proper place. A circulation is established, our eyes follow its path and links come to life. We are invited to experience.

In fact the group functions organically. The engine behind this burgeoning display of life is the imagination. An imagination that is backed up by the will to create order. The raw material (meaning the remnants of past experiences) is made up of all kinds of documents, autobiographical or fictional, as suits, and of objects found, modified or produced. This initial raw material simmers away from day to day to subsequently be built and rebuilt at the mercy of newly produced installations. To give form to life, to one’s own life, is a task that must constantly be undertaken anew. In this sense, we witness a blooming forth that is constantly expanding and that mobilises a dynamic network between on the one hand, our emotional connection with the world and the exacerbation of feeling, translated by forms that are constantly moving between the appearance of being flat and the two-dimensional, and are completely consecrated to sight; and on the other, the search for a plasticity consecrated to touch; and it is all swept up in an effort to unite so that the whole stands firm. Things become fixed. From this unity, there then emerges an invitation to resuscitate the play of forms that initially appeared to be “half-dead”. After the almighty creative power of the game, we call to the other. Without this, nothing would exist.

We must take Sarah Tritz at her word. The clue is in the title: she places herself under the sign of caprice. Meaning what? Caprice, or capriccio, refers to a genre of painting which is generally associated with rococo, and of which the particularity is to represent landscapes punctuated with ruins. The ruins are on the whole invented, truncated and arranged according to the demands of the composition of the painting; or simply copied from real edifices, but inevitably placed in a fictional context that favours a sense of the bizarre and of strange and fantastical associations. In the end, the architectures that are painted are always imaginary. At first glance, one thinks one is looking at an ode to the past. Very quickly it is the historical sentiment that predominates, the events are filtered and reshaped by the artist, the processes of transformation governed only by the artist’s fancy. It would seem that Sarah Tritz shares a family likeness with the caprice. But do not see a deliberate method in this. Rather an other music, the introduction of a new rhythm searching for resonances.

Clara Pacquet
Translated by Elizaveta Boutakova