{ Galerie Papillon }

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Frédérique Loutz
Flip a coin

January 5 – February 27, 2021

Extracts of the texts realized for Girrrland, monograph dedicated to the artist published by The Drawer and Galerie Papillon - to be released this Spring.

Camille Morineau, Frédérique LOUTZ : a partial, passionate, political drawing - December 2020

A gifted artist, a pinch of excess, a lot of humor and the spark of magic. I am writing what Loutz makes me discover: a universe that I hope will enlighten historians as well as collectors, those who love drawing as much as those who are moved by painting and astonished by sculpture. Where one sees that the engraved line can dialogue with painting, sculpture can be the origin of drawing, and the latter being nourished by all the matter of the world. Like an open mouth, or a door, the work of Loutz aspires a world that she "returns" to us with its mysteries, its thickness, its magic, its skin seen from the outside or the inside. A critical drawing, in short, a magnifying glass drawing on the world, whose synesthetic scope resonates with Baudelaire's ideal definition of criticism in the middle of the 19th Century. […]
Proven draftswoman, obsessive engraver, natural sculptor and secret poet, Loutz flirts unceasingly with painting. Her large formats testify to this as well as her direct references to Géricault, Delacroix, Duchamp (Nude descending the stairs), her Virgins with Child, her portraits of Colossus and Dwarves, her innumerable still lifes. Let's listen to her. In 2010, she "begins to consider the background": "large ink and watercolor juices constitute a framework for the landscape, the drawing appears in its drying and I accompany it in its realization". In 2012, the dialogue deepens: "I draw with pencil, it annoys me, I draw with a brush, it has no time to dry, I wet so there are only the contours of my brushstroke trace, so I have lines... Then I rework with color pencil. I treat, she concludes, the drawing as a painting (I use the brush, the gouache, as much as the ink). I also work on very fine canvases... but despite everything, I think it's drawing." But which "drawing" is it?


Julie Crenn, A nation of bodies - April 2020

Several universes collide inside Frédérique Loutz's drawings. Looking at them closely, they bring to mind the dark poems of Henri Michaux, the diary of Frida Kahlo, the exuberant paintings of Peter Saul, the tragicomic expressiveness inherent in the drawings and texts of Sophie Podolski, the dark humor of Roland Topor, the gloomy theatricality of Marnie Weber or the magic of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Frédérique Loutz belongs to an international and timeless family of artists. A family in which each member is dedicated to the representation of existences that are complex, excessive, absurd, expressive, intense and violent. Her works on paper are made of these sulphurous and chaotic ingredients. They reflect a difficulty in defining oneself as well as others. Over time, we perceive different layers of force, traumas, pleasures, silences, screams, open doors and doors that remain closed. […]
Freed from any kind of norms, Frédérique Loutz invites us to explore our secrets, our shame, our pleasures, our violence, our desires and our unconsciousness. In this intimate dive, it is never a question of defining ourselves, quite the contrary. "I like when the drawing shakes things up, shakes me up." In a territory where pleasure and heartbreak coexist, Frédérique Loutz creates different semantics and aesthetics. They are the mirror of timeless metamorphoses. On paper, multiplication generates the undefined. For the artist, it is a question of never settling down in order to constantly try to reach the elusive part of our stories, our relationships and our existences. The drawings formulate questions to which she provides new questions. No response is required. Frédérique Loutz's writing is excessive, tormented, energetic.


The Drawer, The game of Loutz, interview/questionnaire of the artist

What are the rules of Loutz's game? its main language?
Frédérique Loutz: I liked being described as a "self-taught illiterate" by the writer Frédéric Valabrègue in the booklet for my exhibition at the International Poetry Center in Marseille in 2013. I like the idea that one could think that I knew. It is true that I like to deform in order to experience the form and multiply its senses. It is true that forgetting then has its virtues, especially for a messy and borderline mind like mine.
What is my language? I grew up with a dialect: native German, then French. My images therefore proceed from the composite, the heterogeneous mixture, the baroque ("dry baroque" had specified Jacques Monory when he discovered my drawings at the Château de Jau in 2011), and yet I like the net, the fall... In answering, I decree that my language - thank you Jacques said - is dry baroque. Moreover my dialect is dead.
The rules of my game? I code the forms, the subjects, I recode with new grammars in the hope of decoding a message that would tell me about our state, our becoming, our madness, our rescue, my roadmap to come and especially the one of the past. For me, draw is a kind of white magic, to accompany a transformation in the idea of learning and possible sharing.

Your drawings often literally show teeth. Between threat and laughter, what do you choose?
FL: I choose "the between" to tempt "the other". For real! I want to choose the tension between two terms, two forms, two entities. I was born between two cultures, between France and Germany, and I love this space, neither one nor the other, this fertile wasteland. So I plant the threat and the laughter, the sensual and the stiff, the classic and the vulgar to pull the thread between and walk over it like a tightrope walker. Then there is the inside, the plot of what one suspects but doesn't see. For me the drawing hides what it should show and vice versa.

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Graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1997, Frédérique Loutz was a resident of the Villa Médicis in 2007. She has participated in major group exhibitions including the Triennial "La force de l'art 02" at the Grand Palais (2009), the exhibition devoted to women artists elles@centrepompidou (2010) curated by Camille Morineau, Tous cannibales at la maison rouge (2011) and XXL, Estampes Monumentales Contemporaines at the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Caen (2019). Since 2005, Frédérique Loutz's work joined the collections of the Fonds national d'art contemporain and the Centre Pompidou, which will be completed in 2012 with a major donation from the Guerlain. In 2013, she is in residence at the Château de Chambord where she exhibits the first glasses made in Meisenthal, and a whole series of drawings produced there. Major works are also present in the Frac Picardie and PACA collections as well as in renowned private collections. Flip a coin is her 5th solo exhibition at the gallery.