Kooness

Home Shows Romance with a bird

Location

Galerie 21Contemporary

Nice, 21 Boulevard Dubouchage

Share

I start my paintings on the wall with acrylics and then I lay them on the floor to coat them with resin", she explains, "after reinstalling them on the wall, I then use oil paint". It is as if a choreography emerges in this elaboration of her paintings, where each medium "is used systematically for its own qualities". For the artist, the idea is to "create something singular, an object, a physical presence". The energy of dance, the lightness and strength of a grand jeté, for example, animate Racana-Weiler's dynamic compositions, and generate an undeniable musicality.
The best way to understand the works of Olympe Racana-Weiler (born 1990), if one must distinguish one, is through the whole body. The pulsation and breadth of her canvases painted on prepared linen come from the human form, its internal and social rhythms, its movements that are both awkward and transcendent.
Racana-Weiler studied ballet as a child, but then made the decision to take the public's gaze away from her skin and onto her huge canvases. Her works of material-induced gestural abstraction and an idea of the figure begin leaning against the wall, forming a scenography, as it were, in the huge sun-drenched studio where she works in Montreuil. "I start my paintings on the wall with acrylics and then lay them out on the floor to coat them with resin," she explains, "after reinstalling them on the wall, I then use oil paint. It is as if a choreography emerges in this elaboration of her paintings, where each medium "is used systematically for its own qualities". For the artist, the idea is to "create something singular, an object, a physical presence". The energy of dance, the lightness and strength of a grand jeté, for example, animate Racana-Weiler's dynamic compositions, and generate an undeniable musicality. Woodcutting has become just as crucial to the artist, a medium she uses to tackle composition and surface in a way that is as meticulous and fierce as in her paintings.

Winner of the Prix Antoine Marin and the Prix Pierre Cardin, Racana-Weiler has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Jérôme Pauchant and Galerie Eric Dupont, and her work has been shown abroad in Singapore and Bucharest. An assistant to the American painter Jim Dine, Racana-Weiler also studied printmaking at the renowned Steindruck Chavanne Pechmann studio in Apelton, Austria, where the prints in this exhibition were made. The artist's practice has expanded further since last spring, when she worked on her fresco Le chant de la Sybille, commissioned by the Fondation GGL Helenis in Montpellier, for the double-height ceiling and walls of a light-filled room in the Hôtel Richer de Belleval. To be in this place is to enter the mystical Gregorian chant to which Racana-Weiler's title refers. This medieval chant, with its spectral beauty, tells of a prophetic apocalypse. The artist reappropriates this vision, transferring the soprano's song and silence into this form and vivacity of colour. Racana-Weiler's approach to the fresco work led her to confront the structure of this seventeenth-century building, and it was perhaps in taking up this challenge that the artist began to clarify further the architectures that have long structured her own paintings. Thus, despite their great breadth, Orange Magnet and Pretty pink, baby blue, which she painted last summer, like the paintings she showed in her solo exhibition Behind the Eyes last autumn, reveal an even more powerful and tighter sense of composition.

Joan Mitchell's and Helen Frankenthaler's paintings are said to have been the largest paintings in the founding exhibition of Abstract Expressionism known as the Ninth Street Show. By painting canvases of more than two metres, they had transgressed the limits set by the exhibition organisers. In this event with more than 72 artists, two of the dozen or so women in the exhibition literally fought for more space and visibility. In the following decades, it would become the practice in the United States to downplay the work of these women, even though they were present from the start. Similarly, Grace Hartigan's The Persian Jacket (1952) was the very first post-war Abstract Expressionist painting to be acquired by MoMA. An honest study of American Abstract Expressionism compels the recognition that the monumentality, boldness and vigour of her treatment of the figure was all the more powerful and crucial because it was female.