Linda Sanchez
À main levéefrom October 8 to November 19 - 2022
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Linda Sanchez
À main levée
Freehand
October 8 – November 19, 2022
opening Saturday October 8, 3pm - 8pm
For Linda Sanchez's second solo exhibition at Galerie Papillon in the fall of 2022, the artist presents several bodies of recent work including drawing, video, sculpture, and painting, all united by fire and extinction.
If "fire is the objective phenomenon of intimate rage, of an angry hand", as Gaston Bachelard envisaged it, what can be said of Linda Sanchez’s freehand on materials whose inertia is suddenly impacted by the artist's gesture?
Conceived for the most part during the summer of 2022, which will perhaps remain as an inaugural and augural moment for the heavy intensity of the present-day drama in all its thermal release, the works gathered here bear the mark of exhausted energies, incendiary heat, tired wars, as much as they testify to a resistance or even an impulse that joins dexterity and nonchalance.
It is primarily a light touch that acts here: each gesture affirms a starting point of equal uncertainty, no history encumbers the creative freedom; and each result surprisingly establishes a new start, new possibilities, rearranged the moment after on the tabula rasa of the studio’s contingencies.
The video that gives its title to the exhibition testifies to this from the start: the mark of fire acts blindly, with no concern other than the enjoyment of the process, on the unrolled and rerolled white page, of a trace composing an indelible score. If the movement is an unplanned entity, as Len Lye proposed, the animation of the drawing is a vital force that in its fast pace, accepts not knowing where it is going, as long as it accompanies its brevity with an unreturnable brilliance.
Linda Sanchez's studio is filled with the results of an entire series of experiments, attempts, and observations, whose proximity to any defined goal is measured only by the works themselves.
Immediately frozen in the incarnation, and validated as such, each trial assumes a part of irreversibility as well as of individuality.
Thus, an explosive strike is stifled in the thickness of plaster plates: freed from their secret, which is exposed here in full view, the scars imprint each martyred skin with a different outline, sometimes concentrated like a firework, sometimes scattered like a stream of cigarette butts, other times oblong like a fuse on a stick of dynamite.
With a remarkable persistence, Linda Sanchez addresses the blind spots of the destiny of artists: the repetitions-variations which punctuate the artisan’s creations answer to the protocols and findings that are the basis of the scientist’s tenacity, to form families which the artist maliciously arranges.
Resulting from the physical phenomenon of capillary action cracking the upper layer of two pieces of cement with different temporalities, the Pains owe their voluptuous satisfaction as much to fluid mechanics as to Proustian evocation.
Combining both scientific method and common memory, one of the artist’s macadam core drillings establishes itself as a vertical milestone, without it being possible to decide if the painting prevails over the sculpture. What archaeology says to the future, what the stratum takes from the mass, what the margin makes of the page, are chemical, intuitive operations, of which art alone can undoubtedly bear witness.
Linda Sanchez discreetly affirms here, a series of paradoxes: force can be revealed without hardship; rigor does not prevent experimentation; archaeology can be done on the surface; the waterline maintains only a distant relationship with the surface; the most faithful line between post minimal heritage and pop humor can be drawn freehand.
Jean-Christophe Arcos