Pauline Bazignan condenses in her paintings and sculptures the expression of time. She conducts experiments through which she lets herself get carried away by colors. If one can see a floral vocabulary in her artistic practice, for her, it is not so much a question of painting flowers as of making forms emerge and expressing the idea of a certain evanescence. Her paintings refer to both the blossoming, the finitude of nature and evoke a very ambivalent feeling of violence and suspense.1 Pauline Bazignan’s flower motif seems to be able to contain the world. In a somewhat similar way, the orange, stripped of its bark, strikes by its paradoxical strength. This false fragility is another characteristic balance of Pauline Bazignan’s work.2

“There is a large part of chance in my work. We can ask ourselves what part of chance remains controlled or not, because repeating the process means you know very well what will happen. That’s why I work with my unconscious mind, sometimes I let it decide for me. As far as the choice of colors is concerned, I look at the colors in the palette from the day before, and I add some more. There is a kind of magnetization, of attraction, those already there call for others. Each painting is the sketch of the next one, because some colors remain and there is an evolution from one painting to the other.”3 

1. Pauline Lisowski, in “Pauline Bazignan, Du geste pour condenser un temps”, Boum!Bang!, 2019.

2. Matthieu Lelièvre, in catalogue Art is Hope, 2015.

3. in Revue Possible, 2019.

CÈNE, ANTHROPOCÈNE : PERSPECTIVE

by Annabelle Gugnon

The time has come. For whom? For what? And to move in which direction? These are the questions that arise when visiting Momentum, a new exhibition by Pauline Bazignan in which the Italian Renaissance and the invention of perspective gives us the keys to understanding the Anthropocene. This term, used to describe the period we are living in, points to how the actions of humankind are responsible for the destruction of their own biotope. The last syllable of Anthropocene resembles the French and Italian titles of The Last Supper1, which was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in Milan between 1495 and 1498. And yet the meaning of the two words couldn’t be more different. “Cene” denotes a recent geological period, whereas La Cène, the painting’s French title, comes from cenare, which is Latin for to dine. However, in the ample tapestry, the fourteen new paintings and six sculptures produced by Bazignan, these two separate meanings come together in a key idea of which she was not aware at the time. As such, her act of painting is akin to a vision. And as Marcel Duchamp once said: “I believe very strongly in the ‘medium’ aspect of the artist”2.

Using the means that painting puts at her disposal, Bazignan addresses humankind’s urgent need to escape from the viewpoint created by commensuratio (perspective). The Renaissance brought into being a world that could be measured, a world of which humankind was the master. Man began to measure this world, both in painting and in real life. Maps were made and time’s passing was measured thanks to the invention of the mechanical clock. But if Man measured the world, it was with an eye to possessing and exploiting it. In Ultima 2 (2024) and Centre (2024), Bazignan undermines this viewpoint by bringing the furthest areas and the landscape into the foreground and placing them in front of Christ. Other examples include giving the stream the central role in her canvases Tempête 6, 8, 9 (after Giorgione) and revisiting the panels that comprise The Battle of San Romano (1455-1460) by Paolo Uccello, in which she replaced the knights with girandoles seemingly allowing the organic world to supplant history.

The “girandole” motif, a firework-like blossoming or a circular spray of water that resembles two open fans placed

in a circle, has been at the heart of Bazignan’s practice for several years. And indeed, water is her medium of predilection. “My paintings appear with water”, she says. Water is colourless and yet the painter identifies it as the most essential element on her palette, a substance devoid of pigment that pulls colour along, caught up as it is in a wake of forms, signs and paint runs. Water gives life to her paintings as it gives life to the world and Pauline Bazignan puts water centre stage. Water becomes the founding moment of a world to come, a world in which mankind will take its rightful place – no more, no less.

Translation: Simon Thurston

1. “La Cène” in French and “L'Ultima Cena” in Italian.

2. Marcel Duchamp in 1957 in a talk at the American Federation of the Arts Convention in Houston.

 Pauline Bazignan, MOMENTUM

April 20 – June 8, 2024

Praz-Delavallade, Paris, FR

BATAILLE

by René-Julien Praz 

Rather like a writer facing the blank page, Pauline Bazignan is also haunted by the prospect of leaving her mark on the immaculate surface of a new canvas. If she does indeed take up arms and enter the struggle, it is only so that the meaningful and intimate relationship she has established with her subject can come to life at the heart of this virgin territory. Her approach aims to tame the space and provide it with the lines that will become emotions and, in an almost indescribable manner, express the artist’s soul. Bazignan battles to leave apparent the traces of her dominion which, as the painting advances, become a motif in their own right amidst the recurrent corolla motif embodied by paint runs and the explosion of expressive effervescence that gradually takes over the entire canvas. The artist’s trademark compulsive all-over approach leads to a dense, but paradoxically airy entanglement; each painting is like a palimpsest with successive flows of paint that create one drip and run after another. For Pauline Bazignan, painting is all about generalising the sources of tension, whilst doing away with any form of hierarchy between the figure and the background by means of an intricate interlaced design that we would be hard pressed to unravel. She breaks free from all constraints, liberating her gestures and letting her fluid colours run wild creating the signature paint runs that are the aesthetic driving force at the heart of every artwork. ‘‘Rather than leaving the painting, the paint runs clash within the frame revealing unexpected forms.’’(1) And so, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by making the most of chance, Pauline Bazignan allows her colours to run and create different poetic visual effects; the object becomes the subject and as such, refutes the classical theories of painting.

For her first solo show at Praz-Delavallade Paris, Pauline Bazignan takes us on a trip through time back to 1432, when the Florentine Renaissance painter Paolo di Dono, better known as Paolo Uccello, recounted the story of The Battle of San Romano. Uccello needed three very large panels to recreate this epic event, a heroic battle between the forces of Siena and Florence, which Bazignan reinterprets in an astonishing transposition. In Uccello’s paintings, Niccolo da Tolentino, the commander of the Florentine troops, confronts the Sienese army. Battle rages and the sound of clashing swords echoes across the plain near the town of San Miniato in the heart of Tuscany. Pouring forth on all sides, foot soldiers bearing pikes and lances confront other infantrymen holding their pavis(2) in front of their bodies to protect themselves from the deadly spikes. A first wave hurls itself at the enemy, which is followed by a counterattack in a chaotic melee of cavalrymen, lances and horses, including the Florentine commander’s white horse that cuts a swathe through the enemy troops as he unseats Bernardino della Ciarda. For her part, Bazignan adopts the role of a chronicler portraying this confusion in a unique pictorial disorder of her own in which each act of painting bears witness to the final triumph of Florence over Siena. In this epic undertaking, the artist’s “narrative paintings” go from light to dark, as if Bazignan were using colour to express the notions of victory and defeat, a transition that makes these dreamlike paintings even more forceful, imbues them with conviction and tinges her series of paintings and the fragile ceramics that make up the exhibition with the sweet smell of freedom. ‘‘Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.’’(3)

(1) Guillaume Cassegrain, La coulure, histoire(s) de la peinture en mouvement (XIe - XXIe siècles), Hazan, 2015.

(2) The pavis is a large square or oval shield designed to protect the entire body and used by foot soldiers in the Middle Ages.

(3) Paul Klee

Pauline Bazignan, BATAILLE

3 June – 17 July 2021

Praz-Delavallade Paris, FR

FROM MEMORY

by Marie Darrieussecq 

For Pauline Bazignan, action is creation and creation is action. Her body moves. She dances. She inhabits the space. I envy artists their bodies, their momentum, their hands. When I write, only my hands move. My shoulders stiffen, I forget to breathe. Pauline seems led by the four elements she works with: air, water, fire and earth. Her

feet touch the ground from a far, she seems both anchored and airborne. Water she lets run over her canvases – it's almost alarming, will everything disappear? Fire – she sets her sculptures on fire, what is she doing? "My paintings appear with water, my sculptures appear through fire." This destroyer is a creator. She calms our

dismay. To contemplate her work is to enter into calmness. A calmness born from some dark, dangerous unknown, some devastating event – but nonetheless calm.

In slippers like those of a dancer, the ballerina paints. She wields her brushes in a choreography of all possibilities – two-handed, by the armful, circling, scissoring, spraying. To paint is normally to accept two dimensions, to be "flat"; but one day, Pauline Bazignan saw paint running down one of her canvases, and this little disaster

of gravity became her force. She made it her stalk. She paints around an initial, set point, and from this straight stalk. At first the two axes were movements under her hands. As Louise Bourgeois said, "there is always a battle to the finish between the artist and their material: sometimes this gives us a visible result, more often there is no result, but we gain an experience." From memory, what we see in Bazignan's work seems the result of multiple experiments and tests. We also sense in her an acceptance of the invisible, and even a desire for the invisible, paradoxically, to bring things out.

Flowers come to mind but not only these... Stars, meteorites... something that has left a trace after a fleeting bloom...burst...fleeting yet always there, in another form... in the whiteness and lightness... the lightness of memory... The complete opposite of an obligation, as light things are no less important, or serious, as this is firstly a question of style... Painter of gravity in all senses of the word, Pauline Bazignan never imposes any lesson on us. She paints de mémoire –"from memory" – in the sense that she works her memory of movements and forms: she works the memory of the material itself. This is not an archival or automatic-recording type of memory; it's the human, fallible memory of lived experience, here the lived experience of creation. As we understand in the expression "from memory": with randomness, possible errors, play and nuance. The eye watches us, but without menace. The meteor comes down but destroys nothing; it brings life, as we know in the sciences: water comes from meteorites, from their raining down on Earth.

Whirling planet... Life... cycles... flow... tears and blood... tears of joy and blood of birth... accidents... anchorage in the depths... Sculptures of liquid earth, inside orange peels... Bazignan burns the peel; then the sphere – rough, grooved, grainy – appears in negative: tiny capsules of time are these fruits both reduced to ash and recreated, blurry yet solid... From memory, it's also Pompeii: plaster has revealed the inside and thus the silhouette of victims,

their gestures, their individual traits... Like from an other side of the gaze, that would show what has been lost. "Only what we have lost is ours," wrote a blind Borges, remembering colours. 

Pauline Bazignan seems to paint what would remain of a painting... Destruction by water... the trace of an action... a memory... What we see could be a painting of memory, like a memory of water... where the trace of what happened first would appear last... In this sense Bazignan is heir to a long tradition. Turner's contemporaries exclaimed their astonishment when they saw the master painter soak his canvases before starting to paint, then to soak them again after... or coat them in a varnish of his own recipe, until the lines were liquified and the blurs even blurrier... A target for mockery, Turner was the pioneer of those artists from whom Bazignan descends: those for whom it is not enough to paint, but who act when painting, great splatterers like Pollock, great canvas-rubbers such as Klein. "My paintings are only the ashes of my art," declared Yves Klein in 1959. Marguerite Duras, similarly, described her novella The Malady of Death as, "what would remain after a book". Pauline Bazignan, in this tradition of the painting that remains after the painting has gone, nevertheless injects life in the risks of this desert. Terrestrial force, moisture, weight, fire, rain, flow, all become one in her paintings and sculptures. While the traces of these devastating elements linger, Bazignan's work, curiously, remains ever giving, ever full. Its white is generous, round and sensual. Its flowers glow. Its eyes open. Its fragile-looking stalks nonetheless bring forth their sap in these paintings that first appear emptied. There seems to be a very contemporary gesture here, or even a feminine one, if we accept femininity in men and masculinity in women. Bazignan's work harbours the force of an intimate mythology, one that dispenses with words and passes through her whole body, in a dance with the elements.

Semaine 24.19 n°432, Friday 14.06.2019