"These are surfaces, but at the beginning there is the point. The geometric point marks the commencement of each of my works. Even though it's invisible, it's the point that brings to life the line." Lucie Le Bouder

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For her second solo show at the gallery 22,48 m², French artist Lucie Le Bouder engages the gallery's exhibition space with sculptures and a mural in situ resulting from her latest research project at the Darling Foundry in Montréal. A series of drawings made with a cutter will complement the exhibition.
Lucie le Bouder's work seems to derive from hatching, a basic technique for drawings and engravings, where closely spaced parallel or crossed lines are used for tonal and shading effects to bring various figures and forms to life. Using a cutter to incise the lines, the artist shifts and inverses the meaning of this technique by working the surface of coated paper. In addition, in her series Plans, she is intentionally contracting the tridimensional space. The artist draws from architectural plans and superimposes the different layers that form a building. She thereby shifts the initial two-dimensional form towards a new one while de-contextualising the very same architectural data in turning them into the primary source of a work that eludes the surfaces' flatness.
This alteration of the original plan is equally present in wall, a mural created specifically for 22,48 m². It shows a set of lines on white walls, lines that draw a geometric form by following several dots that are set and connected by the artist. A number of cross movements is brought to life by barely perceptible fragments painted in different shades of white. This creates an effect of depth on a surface that a priori presents itself as a simple medium, yet in this case comes to life in the spectator's eye as he makes his way around the gallery.
If the artist withdraws from flatness, she equally withdraws from expansive surfaces. Thus, with the sculptures Pli, she uses folded and refolded plasterboards of various colours to alter the view of the presented objects: like fragments of walls, they seemingly outsmart their own thickness, turning themselves into three-dimensional sketches.
Moving between painting, sculpture, drawing and architecture, and with a logic that abstains from any hierarchy, Lucie Le Bouder creates works whose abstract character seems to gain in intensity in the face of meticulous efforts directed at the exhibition space. The works of the French artist are marked as much by the immediacy of the gesture as by it's duration: more than sketches or ongoing research practices they constitute a real thought process dedicated to a form that continues to be in the making.  

[Umut Ungan, translation by FRANK'S]

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PRESS RELEASE