Galerie L’Échaudé

PARIS VI

Sandra Detourbet 

And unpredictable painting

Sandra Detourbet was born in 1967 and lives and works in Ivry-sur-Seine. She graduated in Art and Space from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1997, and in the period following graduation up until 2003 the young painter never turned down a commission for a mural. Since then, she has devoted her time in the studio to a personal journey for large pieces and, in situ, to her Captures plastiques, a series of sketches made on the fly during rehearsals, shows, and classes in artistic expression. Her work was recently exhibited at the Salon de Réalités Nouvelles (Paris, 2012) as well as in the Fabrique Gallery for the group exhibition of 3 Femmes peintres (Ivry-sur-Seine, 2012). 

For her first exhibition in the Echaudé gallery in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Sandra Detourbethas selected 25 pieces: gouaches and watercolour pastels on paper smoothed on to canvas, “Charlowskis” (four-hand paintings made with her partner, Nicolas Gasiorowski), and a handful of her Captures plastiques, small pieces made with ink. Gouache, liquid inks, drips, erasures, drops, stains, both full and slender, multiple networks of branches that sprawl over Arches vellum, paper that we know to be highly absorbent: Sandra Detourbet’s “fugitive” painting is notable for its use of water. And why does she use the gouache that is ordinarily associated to schoolchildren’s work? Because it provides the artist with “a watercolour effect, a certain freshness that is missing from acrylics or oils. I started using egg tempera and frescos, and tempera is not very far removed from my current techniques. In my view, my work using gouache is a natural progression from how I started out. With gouache, it’s almost a type of alchemy: the medium becomes like the humus, and the sub-layers build up. It’s magical. The paint wins back its freedom, just as nature always reclaims what belongs to it by right when we try to restrict it. Acrylic, a plastic paint that is applied thickly, is incapable of these subtle expressions. Gouache, though, is not. However, I dream of working with oil paints again, but oil is something else entirely: everything has to be planned, it’s another approach to pictures.”  

When visiting Sandra Detourbet’s Studio 602 in Ivry-sur-Seine, door B on the 6th floor of a 70s style building that would not look out of place in one of Tarkovski’s futuristic films, you are guaranteed a change of scenery, on top of the scenes revealed in her adventurous painting. Once inside, you discover the den where the shifting forms of Sandra Detourbet’s “rough” painting are born. Sandra stopped working to let us visit her and her studio, and welcomes us inside wearing a vintage orange jumpsuit of the kind worn on oil rigs; indeed, the label reads Coflexip Stena Offshore. Here, it seems, is a sanctuary where anything can be put to good use. In the words of the chemist Lavoisier, “nothing disappears, nothing is created, everything merely transforms”. 

This does not feel like a space for inactivity, and we sense that it is a place for doing things, trying things out, for making connections... a place for artistic exploration: and this must make itself felt, something must happen in this space. Perhaps it will be blessed with an angel, a success or a failure. Who knows? Did Giacometti not say: “Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary”? What matters is the effort, to create, to expose oneself in order to bring out the unexpected. Detourbet willingly enters this uncertain space, remaining open to all that is new as well as primitive forces. 

Her studio in the Parisian suburbs contains an eclectic mix of objects: a computer, a lamp made from driftwood, writing projects reminiscent of a school blackboard, original pieces from a range of artists, books about Charlotte Salomon and Eugène Leroy, a CD collection that ranges from classical (Gustav Mahler) to contemporary (Amy Winehouse), pots of Linel gouache in saturated shades, boxes of Wilde pastels, as well as a toolbox and some electric drills. While we know that we aren’t at a jumble sale, we feel like we are in a factory or small company where the apparent jumble is surely necessary; from this menagerie of objects, references, and tools, pictorial shapes and compositions may be born, in turn providing a feast for the eyes and imagination of the artist and her visitors.

When talking about this important question of the emergence of figures, Sandra specifies that it is about: “Providing something that to look at seems almost completely out of place; often fantastical, and sometimes the eternal or the everyday. Always a new way of seeing things. What comes next, after the initial act? Looking without obliging, like an announcement of the note which will follow, or which won’t. This is where it begins. I see myself as a dilettante of emotion, a receptacle for transversal projections and an amalgam of life; I work without concentrating on what I’m doing. I grasp onto the truth contained in movement, in memory, or its opposite: what might have been. (...) Images are born from the unexpected where I create the links that are missing. Nonchalance is an honour as well as exposure to the void.” 

When I mentioned “primitive forces” that are present in Sandra Detourbet’s work, it gave rise to ideas of prehistory, or perhaps Leonardo da Vinci who used to look at dirty, old walls in an effort to see the storms or battles that he would create. Prehistory features in Detourbet’s “free as the wind” painting because, by taking nourishment from chance (stains, mistakes, etc.) in order to progress, she launches a sequence of intuitions, desires, and needs. Just like the artists who painted cave walls used the indents and projections in the rock to bring out the lines of a man or an animal, Detourbet uses painting in progress to inspire new forms. From a splash or a streak, a landscape, person, or object appears before our eyes. This constant shifting between one form and another, and the resulting ambiguity is what makes her paintings so successful: they resist a single interpretation. In Visite de courtoisie (81cm x 100cm), are the brown shapes that spread across the canvas animals or layers of scenery? In Notre désir (92cm x 65cm), is the swirling line that structures the composition the image of abundant hirsuteness, a rising motion, or even the result of an explosive male orgasm? It remains a mystery...      

In the evanescent paintings signed by Detourbet - or Charlowski - we can often perceive bodies, organs, blood, purple coverings, a latticework of tangled bodies, a family get-together, a loving embrace, a scene from the country, a dance, twirling letters and more: one shape invites another as one colour gives way to the next, never stopping, without conclusion. Figures alternate with shapelessness, drawings with writing, the sublime and the ridiculous, raw graffiti with learned allusion, compulsive strokes with the blank paper protected by its emptiness, the lines of one artist with those of another, Nicolas Gasiorowski, for whom “giving shape to an image together is our aim. Two somewhat grotesque clowns making little monsters together”. Clearly, what we have here is a refined painter who assimilates her successes as well as her mistakes (or false connections) to create her playing field. Especially as painting itself, as a work in progress, is also able to deceive the eyes; and we will give the final word to a legend of modern art, Pablo Picasso: “Painting is stronger than me, it always succeeds in making me do what she wants.”     

Vincent Delaury