Back to the Basics: Ketabi Bourdet - 22, passage Dauphine 75006 Paris

With this new presentation, the artist continues her exploration of the forms and materials of everyday life, playing with their alteration, repetition, and deployment in space. Her work, rooted in a meticulous observation of industrial and domestic textures, seeks to reveal the inconstancy of these familiar elements, their propensity to mutate and vibrate under the effect of gesture and time.

Through painting and printed images, Pauline d’Andigné engages in a dialogue between spontaneity and anticipation. Her compositions emerge from an iterative process: each pictorial intervention responds to the previous one, creating a shifting balance in which forms and colours merge and reorganise themselves. In her canvases, colour is not confined to the contours of a precise figure, but migrates freely, infusing materials and surfaces. Gestures, sometimes erased and sometimes accentuated, feed into this unstable dynamic, in which the motif oscillates between appearance and disappearance.

In the Dip Paintings series, Pauline d’Andigné transposes motifs inspired by spontaneous drawing into a play of multiplication and displacement. These fluid forms, reminiscent of the mechanics of stains or imprints, assert themselves on the canvas with a vibrant materiality. The artist further amplifies this effect by enlarging her gestures through photography before screen-printing them. Far from a mechanical application, these impressions leave room for errors and irregularities that animate the surface, disrupting the neutrality of the repeated motif.

Impermanence is a key notion in her work. Through the alteration of motifs, the dissolution of colours, and the apparent instability of her compositions, she seeks to convey a transient state, a tension between the fixed and the moving, between memory and erasure. This dynamic is also reflected in the way she occupies the exhibition space. By playing with the scale of the works and their relationship to the site, Pauline d’Andigné reduces the distance often imposed by exhibition scenography. Her paintings and prints are not simply meant to be viewed; they extend, overflow, and establish an immersive presence that engages the viewer in a physical and sensory experience.

For the first time, the artist presents a series of monotypes in which she explores the motif of the flower, a simple and universal form that evokes childhood drawings and the spontaneity of gesture. This work on paper extends her intuitive approach to motif and material, playing with notions of addition and subtraction. Painted with a brush but also directly with her fingers, these compositions emerge as much through the application as through the removal of paint, revealing traces, erasures, and transparencies that lend the forms a vibrant and ephemeral presence. A remarkable colourist, the artist expresses the full richness of her palette here, oscillating between soft and saturated tones, delicate harmonies, and pronounced contrasts. Through their lightness and immediacy, these works on paper enrich the exhibition as a whole, offering a sensitive perspective on her relationship to gesture and pictorial materiality.

With Back to the Basics, the artist returns to the foundations of her approach: an exploration of forms, materials, and their transformation, in a constant movement between familiarity and strangeness, control and letting go.