Tempera on canvas 2011-2012
The shapes are oblong, yet they sometimes turn in upon themselves, instead of stretching out, and henceforth a density takes over the innate grace. They are shapes that remind us of ... we can't say quite what. They are biomorphic, certainly, but here, it's of unknown plants, even more than bodies, that we are reminded. Without certainty. And therein lies the essential quality of Isabel Michel's work: its quality of uncertainty.
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The shapes are oblong, yet they sometimes turn in upon themselves, instead of stretching out, and henceforth a density takes over the innate grace. They are shapes that remind us of ... we can't say quite what. They are biomorphic, certainly, but here, it's of unknown plants, even more than bodies, that we are reminded. Without certainty. And therein lies the essential quality of Isabel Michel's work: its quality of uncertainty.
An abstract painter but of an abstraction that we sense as being extracted from the world: not in the sense of being cut off, but, on the contrary, because, for the artist, extraction is a concentration which does away with the exterior appearances of life the better to express its very pulsation, its beat. Covering, uncovering, spreading out the paint, giving shape, rounded and enclosed, to colour, painting thinly and working the surface. Thus Isabel Michel's work advances, in an oscillation between doing and undoing, not a hesitation, but rather an extreme consciousness of the precariousness of the act of painting itself. A canvas, and the paint starts over again. Is the white a background? How do forms take hold in a painting? And the yellow, will it bear up to the neighboring blues? Isabel Michel knows not, and it is as well thus, for she paints not to give an answer, but in order to keep the questions alive.
Pierre Wat
Translated from the French by Erin Lawlor
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