Delphine de Luppé

Delphine de Luppé's pictorial vocabulary attempts to reduce the object to a symbol, in a clash of opposites. Her figures fluctuate between scribbled surfaces and defined structures. This concept blends, shares and shapes the plans of her paintings. Straight lines and geometric shapes, colourful flat tints, architectural cross-sections, optical illusions and material combinations, urban and rural maps take shape over, under and within one another, to the beat of oil sticks.

Her recent work delves further into the concept of topographic zoom. Through a restricted perspective, the artist attempts to contain the entire scene within the surface area of the canvas. She sees her work as walls that block the view.

Delphine de Luppé also uses images taken from old books, travel guides, technical documents, private works... She takes the original images and covers them with a coloured network, which brings out the prominent part. Black dots or red lines skim over the print, just as scaffolding reveals the shape of the building it protects. Reproduced on large construction tarpaulins, the images become a canvas where wool embroiders a new story, by adding a symbol, by duplicating a line.

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On old paper covered with words and images from the past, Delphine de Luppé traces new signs in pencil, acrylic or oil stick. It's as if she were rereading history over and over again. Books, treatises, postcards, travel guides, heliogravures... The sources vary. Almost all of them sublimate the buildings of past centuries, these ruins and monuments inspiring respect. This habit of borrowing, of working from a model, no doubt inherited from the sketchbooks she once filled with copies from the Louvre, means that she is close to that which precedes us and which, for sure, will outlive us. Among the handful of motifs in her repertoire, the arch is king. At once a hollow and a summit, it supports and connects, building a bridge between the world of yesterday and his vision of the future. For here, to continue means to continue, and even when the original background drowns under a graffiti-like tangle of lines, it doesn't disappear. Elsewhere, the game turns to trompe-l'œil, or even exquisite corpse: trained in ephemeral architecture, Delphine de Luppé plays with perspective and elements of décor, grafting a chandelier, a capital, a pair of curtains here and there, scaffolding plans, taking care with her staging. By going back in time, the archive is updated. The finished impression returns to the sketch stage, and then vice versa: with naive strokes, the boldness of the pastel writes the sequence of events.

Virginie Huet