Wakes

February 22 – April 6, 2019
Karine Frechette : Wakes (Sillages)
In collaboration with Galerie René Blouin
Art Mûr Berlin

Text by Karine Fréchette

Keep moving forward, always. Keep moving until exhaustion. And remember to leave a trace, even the most ephemeral one. Longing for a connection from these trails left behind, regardless of the distance of the signal.

This series of paintings depicts oscillating modulations and abstract presences, emerging from sinuous networks of fuzzy and glitchy lines. The slow labor required to achieve these pictorial gestures leads paradoxically to allusions to the screen, the speed, the ongoing and ghostly volatility of intangible waves. Like a seismograph, the pictorial gesture becomes an electric spasm. The pictorial surface becomes a conductor that channels an energy that crosses space and bodies.

One reference replaces another: Futurism and its pictorial its strategies to describe dynamism and motion, to the velocity modeling of natural phenomena and other scientific graphic representations as well as the analogical experiments surrounding light, reverberation and feedback loops in video art, or even esoteric myths such as the aura and telepathy.

Such diverse inspirations serve to fuel a pictorial fiction. More precisely, the aim is to translate visually the inebriation induced by continual movement and its own ephemeral trace, a wake through space and time. At the same time, I try to pursue a conversation on the static object – painting’s vector of memory – and the etheric mobility of telecommunications. Ultimately, this is a reflection on the notion of progress through this slow, patient and enduring practice that is painting.