Engravings are made in intaglio
from brass plates.
Editions are limited, numbered and signed by the artist.
They are made at the Arús-Pazot workshop in Barcelona.
Eau courante, “ Running
water ”. The title of the first work intrigues considering
what we see. Well, says Brigitte Pazot, the fact is that this water
has nearly disappeared by dint of running, running over the stones.
But see how intensely present it is within the complex marks of
its fluidity that border on writing. Look, on the granite like mass,
at these sparse and hardly showing microscopic organic presences,
look at these signs, runes, ideograms, seemingly picked up by an
archeologist on a tracing paper, look at these remnants of ancient
poems, at these regrets of fish and seaweeds, memories of an ecosystem
already rarefied.
Some fascinating and frail creatures, fortunately,
are still wriggling in the dazzling depths (water or air?) of Fugitif
présent. And at the heart of matter, vital energy abounds
and buzzes, like these tiny branes that the modern string theory
supposes, eager for bringing together the laws of the infinitely
big and the ones of the infinitely small. The mere idea of them
rejoices the Esprit vagabond, with its robust and creamy
neurons.
Like the new insights of the theory of
matter, of neurobiology, of astrophysics, these intensely suggestive
universes worry and delight. Shall we dare venture ourselves at
the Horizon d’événements, at the very
edge of the black hole (of our mortality), and bend over the membrane
that matter and light can cross so easily one way but never when
returning? It might be that, on the other side, it is not black
but pink, like in Point Zéro…
Anxiety/impulse, materiality/evanescence,
front/back, many of the latest works by Brigitte Pazot call at each
other, converse with each other, answer each other. Tsoin-tsouin
inverts and carnivals In Petto. On the overheated background
of Migration, a whole culture is going up in smoke, oriental
signs of an extreme grace fray and disintegrate, leaving behind
only some black coals and the feeling of having lost everything.
On the contrary, A découvert, seen from above, as
the crow flies, is the country of good men, the country of the large
river with bubbling and chattering banks, a land that one can go
through with pride and a cheerful heart. Utterly different, obviously,
is the empty and slashed arena of Mots suspendus, scratched
with pins, needles, hooks, spears, deprived of language by violence
— at the lower edge of which, hurt, imagination would like
to recognize hills, a village, a humanity.
Eventually, in a kind of fusion of the
opposites, the Pierre levée with long hair stands
up, light and completely restored to a ferruginous vitality, in
a space made denser by thin and regular hatches. And, in a maelstrom
of organic events, Simultanéité exorcises
the anxiety of sterility, of evaporation, of carbonization.
In the end, in A fleur d’eau,
water has the last word, retained, boiling, liberated water: majestic
water.
Nadine Satiat
The origin of everything is the riverside,
from where Brigitte Pazot gazed at the running water, at the waterworn
stones, polished by the current, keeping in their veins the memory
of mysterious signs and lines.
The copper plate, scratched, bitten, attacked
by acids, is the stone, the superimposition of the different plates
suggesting water.
A mysterious exchange is taking place,
and the stone speaks: look at these snatches of writing that feverishly
run to the borders.
The stone has a secret agreement with life,
with the blue of waters, the worried green of phytoplankton, the
ochre of the sands, and that is all that Brigitte Pazot, venturing
with colour, wants to convey.
Nadine Satiat
Les Nouvelles de l’estampe, number 201 |
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