Incomplete open

It is first of all the composition of the space that we seek to understand in the drawings of Mathieu Lacroix. Where are we ? It is not quite a defined space, nor a random arrangement. What is the angle of view? And the scale? Then, we try to identify what shapes this composition. Everything seems familiar to us: the architectural structures, the objects, the codes related to work, to the task, the postures of the rare silhouettes. Do they exist as such? Are they imagined by Lacroix? What are the links between all these elements?

But all this is in vain. Nothing will be revealed to us. We will only know that the artist has as starting points what is in his environment. But nothing can be named with certainty. Questions will remain unanswered, or rather open to all answers. Because if space does not reveal everything, it is enough. It is enough to evoke enough clues for images to be born, for us to find our bearings there.

If everything is recognizable, then why do we have trouble identifying the dimensionality of this distilled universe, the context of its appearance? It is because the space of the work is an anti-construction. Not that it is not thought out, reflected, built, but nothing is anchored there, nothing forms an inhabitable space. Everything is superimposed: planes, elements, materials. Everything is an accumulation: of reminiscences – ours, his –, of signs, of lines. Everything could possibly move, potentially compose another space, rearrange itself. And it is this malleable character which, strangely, allows us to imagine stories.

In this series, the human figure is schematized and experienced: it multiplies or is overwhelmed. If it is less present in the drawings, it is because it has sometimes left them to settle on the wall, without however being an extension or standing back to observe them. The space not being circumscribed, even if it is contained on the sheet, the limits of the work are not defined by a frame or by a rigid structure, this thus allows the figure to come out of it and to take its place in space.

By

Catherine Barnabé