Florence Grundeler

Florence Grundeler is a visual artist born in 1968. She is a sinophone and has been influenced by Chinese culture. She has also learned from her stays in Brazil and Argentina. In installations, engravings, and especially canvases crossed by threads and ink, this proponent of the material brings space and emptiness to life to better define the brilliance and lines that emerge. Trained in landscape rather than artistic image, she claims her need for a minimum of immaculacy in the way she works. By meaningfully calling her studio "the In-between," the artist confirms her desire to explore the margins, the intervals, allowing for some possibilities in the freedom, instinct, or clumsiness that led somewhere else.

[...] On the canvas, the threads draw a framework, a ridge line on which the tightrope walkers play. The thread crosses the emptiness and presents its ends, like the line of the hand, threatened to be cut by the Fates of the fable. "I have pricked all my horizons, all my crossings", she says. Like so many vanishing points, that is, possibilities, each thread runs through the wefts of the quilted cotton sheets, which could be read with the fingertips like Braille. The material, in general, has a special place in this work. The paper is like a skin, fluffy and eager to be caressed, and the reserves are those of a landscape artist respecting the state of nature. These papers of threads sewn without frame or law limit their range to natural tones (between white and black for the most part) as if they were themselves fibers detached from the bark of textile plants. Colour is never used in its illusionist function but as a material: liquid black, ash grey, lead white; and Indian ink in particular. Florence Grundeler speaks of the discovery of this medium as a real encounter. The physical experience arises in the smell and in the way the liquid spreads, like a backwash surprising a semi-drowsiness.

This immediacy of technique is an aspect of the artist's work, particularly in the series of oil, ash, Indian ink, and thread on paper. The material accumulates in the mind before slipping onto the support. It springs from a meditation like an extension of the breath. The gesture thus retains a certain autonomy, a spontaneity, but at the same time a form of fragility, as illustrated by the pieces of tarlatan folded in on themselves like burning papers or the incorporation of ashes into the material...

Thinking of the gap is dear to Florence Grundeler, who explores the materials between black and white, tightness and loose, flatness and solid. The thread/line duo is answered by the cube/pavement duo. Éloge de l'altérité is a square installation (160 x 160 cm) made up of breeze-block cubes arranged in a grid to leave empty spaces. Most of the blocks are topped with a zinc, copper, or steel plate, with a more or less reflective and matt surface. [...]

Perhaps lightness is to be found in something as compact as concrete paving stones or the knotted weave of weaving?

Elora Weill-Engerer, art critic