My first encounter with the work of Sibylle Baltzer took place in Marseille more than ten years ago - thanks to my friend Jean-Pierre Alis in the very historic Athanor gallery. He wanted to defend the work of this young artist - an artist in whom he had sensed that which he had always looked for in the painters he exhibited. An ability to conceive artistic proposals far from the shimmering shards of spectacle and effect imposed by the dictatorship of the art market. A painting close to a poetic language in a way- which would have more to do with the proximity of the void than that of the full. A painting which would tell nothing but whose presence, the supremacy of colour and richness of material would summon the absence.
I saw in the canvases of Sibylle Baltzer this confrontation between solids and voids, that of painting with the support often left raw, a canvas stretched and chosen for its visual qualities, its presence already as raw material and naked, which she leaves visible on large surfaces as an essential part of her work. There is in Sibylle Baltzer's work the inscription of a form that rubs shoulders with abstraction but maintains a remnant of significance, a meaning that is not hidden but detached from any discourse. It is in this illegibility of meaning, in this loss in a way, that it gains in plastic quality, provokes our sensory depths.
This new series of canvases and paintings in volume is the in-depth continuation of this work on the wire between geometry and subtle play with space. I remember having cited the work of the Swiss painter John Armleder and the Neo-Geo movement, which explored this beyond abstraction, the painting becoming an object. We are in this continuity, in going beyond painting, in the form of irony even concerning the academicism of abstraction when objects or cut surfaces are mixed with abstract paintings, in a salutary distance from the work of art and in the attempt to trivialize it. The same acid colours and a little pop, bright pinks soft greens, and yellows strip the space like flashes of light in stretched landscapes, always this search for movement in pure colour to install the presence and the visual power of the painting.
There is a great sensuality in showing the paint in this way spread out, left in the memory of the gesture and the friction of the brush. There is indeed no form that is not situated between wound and caress, a trace of the effort that is both affectionate and aggressive on the support. Yes, the painting is still there, far from the codes of abstraction or geometry, where we feel this "discordant fragility of forms" that the Cuban novelist Zoé Valdès spoke about in Sibylle’s work.
Yes, Sibylle Baltzer attempts another surpassing in this recent work, that of putting it into the volume by a skilful game of cutting out the very shape of the painting. Her work on geometric deconstruction had to go through this. These series whose edges are painted in another color leave the field open to optical effects and illusions of volume. It is without leaving the "painting" that Sibylle Baltzer creates these painted volume devices, multiplying the angles of view. She who has never refused the influence of the masters, drawing from the common heritage of the history of abstract art to implement a language that would be her own, today develops a system of vision that compels the viewer to no longer stand in a frontal position in front of the painting, as assigned to the game of perspective in the Renaissance, but to operate a sideways movement to reveal the volume.
The proof that painting continues to be an endlessly questionable medium, renewable in its implementation. No need then for additions of gleaned materials, of "already there" paint, it is the painting that takes on the status of an object, with no function other than decorative but why deny it, this "function" has not always been that of painting? To paint is to suggest colour as an emotion. Polychromy and the relationship of colours between them install this emotion, which Claude Viallat would not deny, he who was his teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. It is this outcome in her work that appears today. This colour deposited on sorts of cut-out and geometric constructions, this painting volume with this minimum of means, this so little that makes sense. A painting that would burst into the space of the wall as if to make an image of its lost flatness, and in the color would do this with joy.
Bernard Collet
2011 | 2013 | 2022
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