Pauline d'Andigné, Sipping Bleach: Ketabi Bourdet - 22 passage Dauphine, 75006 Paris

Drawing on the visual vocabulary of production and consumption, Pauline d’Andigné pushes the appetite for forms and colours to the limits of disgust and trash, thus playing, through a rhetoric of excess, on the correlation between attraction and repulsion. A commentary on the society of entertainment and excess that characterises hypermodernity, and an expression of a troubling ambiguity, this work takes on a multidisciplinary dimension, of which the exhibition offers a recent overview. Whether paintings and screenprints on fabric, padded vinyl wall works, or cones that have lost all their authority through their bulges, this body of work belongs to the artist’s preferred repertoire of “soft forms”. It reveals as much a pleasure in diversion as a touch of humour, given substance through an in-depth treatment of layers of material, effects of transparency, and suspension.

In her works on fabric, Pauline d’Andigné experiments with a number of pictorial gestures that are either subtracted or added. The first stage of her process consists of bleaching the textile with bleach, in areas and in a random manner, followed by the screen-printing stage, which deposits in places a particular relief, a cardboard-like texture, a raw consistency that echoes the urban world, the realm of packaging and manufactured products. Painting itself intervenes in a much more conscious manner from this preliminary result, which is more subject to the whims of the material. An entirely organic dimension unfolds in these flows of globular forms, through which circulate both a vital energy and a kind of narcotic pleasure. An invitation to leisure that almost encourages one to wallow in the rounded forms of the cones, offered here and there. The artist also refers to animated digital wallpapers, whose visual resources can be found here: artificial hues, optical effects, retinal excess... The density of these works, however, is far more subtle, and each repeated motif could represent an opening onto an inner world, traversed by the multiple resurgences of these earlier layers. One senses the momentum of movement, the fleeting and chaotic interweaving of visual memories, a force unwilling to resign itself to the applied neutrality of “patterns”.

The vinyl wall works propose a more enigmatic and minimalist version of this idea of a window, a passage, with an assumed ambivalence (could they be frames?). Their padding likewise echoes a form of modern comfort, while the chosen material clearly refers to industrial production. Through their metallic colour, which contrasts with their slumped appearance, the cone sculptures play on their own contradiction. The grotesque and unsettling aspect of their mere presence—formless, cumbersome—marks a true travesty of the commanding symbolism and common use of this object as a tool for signalling, marking out, and directing around obstacles. In this respect, they confirm the tongue-in-cheek quality at work throughout the entire body of work.

The “Pop” legacy finds an unprecedented contemporaneity in Pauline d’Andigné’s work, thus becoming the subject of a cynicism verging on a certain provocation of good taste. While the influence of the “Bad Painting” movement can indeed be felt, it is rather within a skilfully negotiated in-between, a troubled zone of pleasure, that the artist carves out her singularity.

Eva Pion