Récidive

"The movement of bodies, movement in bodies; movement on the page, on the sheet of paper, on the wall; the movement of the sheets in books, the movement of the face in the frame or in the viewfinder, the movement of the hands in the graphite powder... This visual arts exhibition, as they say, is maybe a ballet, that is, the movements in the works here, as elsewhere in bodies, are contrary, turbulent and at the same time tiny. They are choreographed. They stretch, assert themselves and become blurred. They live and remain in the objects. Exhibiting such works, exhibiting them on the basis of the mobility within them, more or less amounts to repeating the thinking process behind them-not so much a bringing into the light as a passage through light. With Christian Lhopital, in the drawings, this process takes into account shade, line and the black layer of graphite. With Isabelle Waternaux, from one photo to another, with what passes from reiteration to pulsation, it is as if the portrait was revealing its inner face.

Christian Lhopital has been engaged for some ten years in several different directions: graphite powder wall drawings, a grand fleeting gesture on a white wall; sets of drawings on paper and the production of sculptures from painted fluff. On show will be a collection of works representative of these various approaches. Despite the variety of techniques, the work forms a consistent whole, one of its modes being astonishment. Thus, for this exhibition, he is to produce a wall drawing in two of the rooms, and for the first time all the drawings in the Broken Shadows cycle (25 drawings from 1999) will be on display, these being of special importance for having been produced during the same period as the early wall drawings.Isabelle Waternaux takes photographs where a breath passes through. They may take the form of portraits, a cloud configuration or dance movements. This breath becomes the breathing of the pictures themselves. It forms a tangible link between a subject and its image. Chim Naline (2000), which will be on show as part of the exhibition, is a set of seven diptychs produced in a single week. There is a very organic effect that comes through in these photographs, like an egg hatching. We find this same logic of movement brought into play in Correspondances (a book by the artist brought out on this same occasion)."Éric Brunier, 22 December 2004.