From the armchair of my pink king
2 April – 30 April 2011

  « ...in one breath... »*

Extract from an interview with Guillaume Hervier in January 2011

Who “are you, Sarah Tritz”?

It is a funny question. You feel like being self-derisive confronted with it...

I will answer in the conditional and a few desultory words.

I would like to be Rauschenberg’s and Phyllida Barlow’s grand-daughter, Goya’s niece, Paul Thek’s cousin, for example.

A mixture of styles, therefore of eras. I am thinking of Paul Thek’s Reliquaries.

The Reliquaries join what is minimal and a pulpit, a detail, a jewel, perspex. I do love it.

The countess takes off her feathers and agrees to play with a stem rather than with a whole piece of furniture. Nevertheless, the stem must go back to the marble and the tropical lime-tree, otherwise, it has no strength.

For your next solo ehibition at Gallery Anne Barrault, have you thougt about the space (of the gallery) in which it will stand? Will it be constraining?

Space is always constraining. I like to rearrange it. Last autumn I showed my drawings hanging simply lined up on the wall. I am sorry I did not put more of myself in the hanging. To me, the work goes from the birth of the form in the studio to its hanging . It is part of the creative process which goes with the forms. It is a way of testing their necessity, to experiment it outside the studio. To put a piece of work in the place of the exhibition, without pondering over its meaning hic and nunc, seems dangerous to me, and meaningless for my forms.

Arranging the space and settling a few days in a place condition me so that I can concentrate and make choices.

I need a link between the time of making and that of showing. And this link is the preparation of a new space.

“Staging” and above all conditioning the spectator are issues I always consider. How to make the spectator partake in a time which is not his? How to make him aware of a possible experience in front of a form? I owe a lot to Bernhard Rüdiger who was my teacher at Lyon National Art College for that very question.

I like the idea of Duchamp being an expressionist, a discreet expressionist.

There is no conceptual art without gesture or humour. If one is afraid of gesture, how is it possible to choose?

You cannot totally free yourself from the act of making, such a belief leads to mediocrity, whether you are a conceptual artist or whatever else.

By the act forms are organized through the chosen gestures.

I do love thresholds. They are the key-moments of perception.

I am very interested in this period of time when there is no landmark. It is when your perception can develop, therefore your thinking. Sometimes it can also be, in rare cases, a moment of strange dread. This is what I try to reach when I display my works.

To keep wishing to create “disquiet” (as Pessoa puts it), while each piece is self-sufficient, without compromise.

Can you tell me more about your referents. Do you always have them in mind when you make your images? Are they tributes to those you meet in your practice?

Usually this memory process works without my knowing it. Either art history sails as it pleases in the studio, or, indeed, I call it to ge out of a formal dead end. Or, on the contrary, the forms come without the help of art history images. All depends. I think that the more things you have seen and the further you advance in time, the more digested the references are , and appear surreptitiously, here and there, so I hope. Yes, pieces like “Mes petites modernités” are tributes to those who light my practice : Arp, Kandinsky, Taeuber, Klee, Kupka, Matta, Miro, Schwitters, and so many others.

You present a totem. In your artistic inspiration , immediacy shows. Could you tell me how you work?

You are right about immediacy. I work very much on the spur of the moment. Making or acting immediately often comes after seeing a work of art which has made me happy. It does not mean my gestures are quick, it depends.

Before knowing where I am going, I must be confronted with a formal problem to be solved. I like to spend several days on the same problem !

In the studio, you can set to work and imagine forms. It is where you project. Very often I happen to destroy what has been made at the first attempt, and to go on with what has been left of the destroyed thing. To redefine, adjust, and last but not least put details. If your intuition is not redefined, it loses strength. it can even be very stupid. Nothing exists without being paradoxical.

When I go back to sculpting, it is inevitalbly a human figure. It is an introduction.

_______________________________________
With this solo exhibition in galerie anne barrault, Sarah Tritz’s polymorphous work reveals her interest in space and in the way of making it her own. The artist shows her recent works tinged with anachronistic lyricism, in which architectural shapes mix with hercollages and drawings. This experimenting in constructing/deconstructing suggests avenues to danger and makes one go further.

The variations about her own referents, which cover art history and mark out  its aesthetics, make her work candid and offhand as far as today’s aesthetics is concerned. This approach calls for an ambitious project, that of the revival of radical universal artwork. But is the viewer shown universal work , or is it a possible abuse?

Sarah Tritz does not eschew the problem of movement, that is to say, how to show it through her productions. Her pieces made immediately, more precisely, instantaneously, express time, temporality. The crystallized gesture binds us to her wishes, her dreams, her doubts. Both “structural” and “wild” is Sarah Tritz’s paradox about the sign of her movements. A piece of furniture thought as a plinth, fragments of disparate pieces, her drawings and collages made from memory testify to the multiplicity of her works. In the maze created by the various mediums and devices she scatters, the physical experience is part of an inescapable structure.

In addition to the deliberately awkward expression of some of her pieces,  there is a very accomplished search for material. Like with her collages, the organization of her productions, in which the compositions are stratified by accumulation and saturation, suggests the artist resists when confronted with the object. In the heart of this environment, the configuration of the gallery is given a rough time, plasterboard walls are superimposed. This refraction cast into the space dedicated to the exhibition allows the transition of the time of expression to the moment of its appearance.

From these productions beyond any art classification, we get the measure of the drifts and diversions orchestrated by the artist.

Guillaume Hervier

*The quotations heading this article  come from a talk between Sarah Tritz and Guillaume Hervier when this exhibition was being worked out.

with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques (aide à la première exposition),
ministère de la Culture et de la Communication.