Vodlorezo installation
Vodlorezo installation
Only problem was that everyone wanted more of it
and I just wanted to retire to a certain painful,
dolorous minimalism inspired by my ongoing
conversion to the Catholic faith. Discovering
cigarette paper as a medium was another of those
advances in my inspiration which was a countercolour revolution. White was the only colour I
aspired to after years of overdosing on rich colour.
Losing everything like Job, the agent, the
followers, the pay and the aunties who couldn’t
identify with my work anymore, I have found a
regenerating middle ground where everything that
I’m made of is there, lock, stock and barrel. I churn
on painting, installing, building, somehow tumbling
from inspiration to inspiration urgently feeling the
pulse of time.
The intrinsic memory of objects has become a
source of inspiration which has transformed my
two-dimensional vision to a three-dimensional one,
where fishermen’s cabins strewn with revisited
objects occupy space and urge the discovery of life
and geography. The Unfinished Stories exhibition in
Biarritz earlier this year was a marker for me, in
that it contained beauty, geography, architecture,
refinement, fragility, spatial awareness and volume,
giving new sense to objects which have sometimes
been decontextified.
I am in the throes of completing the Amazonia of
the Cold Lands series, inspired by the landscapes of
New Zealand’s South Island West Coast which will
be inhabited by birdsong and wall-to-wall paintings.
There again the absence of man is an essential
feature of the landscape yet it is dominated by
presence…
I returned from Karelia in Russia where I very
recently did a residency in the lands of the gulag,
where the bones and struggles of political prisoners
fertilize the imagination. My environmental
installation in Vodlozersky National Park was a
mark made in a place of discreet beauty, a mute
dialogue with Russia, past and present.
The intense and intimate concentration and love
of métier needed to make art, the thrill of feeling the
whole composition working, coming into being is
awesome in its pure sense. Awesome because the
eye, the soul and the hand synchronize to produce a
material result which mysteriously defies the
invasive parameters of the rational.
www.camillemassontalansier.com