Recherche Architecturale II

« if entering was

possible

maybe

we could

get out »

Silvia Baron Supervielle, En marge, Paris, Éditions Points, 2020

Naturally, laying down a grid contributes to the perspective. Mathilde Lestiboudois’ painting gives the impression of depth, without being strictly a trompe-l’oeil. The setting she depicts does not hold together. The arches, which appear to be cut off in places, defy gravity through the magic of the image, a static representation of a space that is above all mental. The vocabulary developed by the painter over the last few years has something radical to it, with its draperies, arches and columns, chairs and basins. Drawing on archetypes, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, she suggests bodies without needing to represent them, spaces without needing to enclose them, and ultimately, playfulness. Signs and symbols are part of her work, such as it is the case with surrealists like Kay Sage, Helen Lundeberg, and, in a more linguistic sense, Magritte. The presence of water and the suggestion of air anchor any interpretation of her work in a relationship with dreams; crossing a porch becomes like a rite of passage, through the immersion in a pool of some kind of purification.

The very smooth brushwork, the way in which the artist seeks to conceal her gestures in the gradations and refers to a meticulous geometry, encourage projection. The canvases organize a frontality which is specific to theater. Certain compositions in gray tones on tracing paper bring to mind the rigor of the models and drawings of theater director Adolphe Appia. The position of the objects is enough to establish a dramaturgy, and the different treatments of textures create different levels and reveal the relationships between the real and the virtual. Everything is a question of thresholds in Mathilde Lestiboudois’ painting. The installation work she develops in connection with her paintings, which extends them into the exhibition space, physically translates this concern. The shape of the canvases and the composition of panels of different sizes cut across the wall and what we might see through it. A thin metal arch recreates a space within a space, like a silhouette, a shadow, a disturbance or a doubt.

Increasingly, the artist talks about glitches, those jumps in the image that are specific to screen time, loading times, and calculation errors. An awareness of the digital world haunts her paintings like a hidden memory. Isn’t there a connection between the way we represent places and the organization of memory? Researcher Donatien Aubert has developed a theory that ars memoriae extends into cyberspace. Painting, by its very nature, is a space of circulation and, layer after layer, it organizes resurgences. Mathilde Lestiboudois’ spaces are not unrelated to the liminal spaces whose representation is multiplying in cinema, on the internet, and in forum culture. In most cases, these are discussions about the best way to find the exit; in other perspectives, they may also be about finding the entrance.

Henri Guette