Formations 03.09-24.09.22 & 06.10-03.11.22

Formations is the first exhibition of the new season at Galerie C-Paris. It is a solo show in two parts (Formation I and Formation II) of the artist Sabine Hertig (CH).

Sabine Hertig's first exhibition at Galerie C is in two parts: two Formations necessary to apprehend the artist's work. These two different artworks hangings, one from September 3 to 24, 2022 and the second from October 6 to November 3, 2022, show the atlas of the artist, her worlds made of the matter of our existences.

Through archival images or photographs - of works, scenes, monuments or events - taken from second-hand books and magazines, Sabine Hertig creates pictorial collages. The latter are environments that respond to their own rules, in full autonomy: these collages are image formations - which seem to belong to our collective memory - creating cloistered spaces (Untitled series), anthropomorphic forms (Head or Body series) or monumental and totally open worlds (Landscapes series). Once these spaces are defined, a game of scale takes place. First of all, between the near and the far, and according to the position of the viewer in relation to the work: by taking a distance, the pictorial aspect of Sabine Hertig's work appears to us evident. Like a painter, Sabine Hertig constructs, through the play of light and shadow, a perceptible space, a palpable landscape that seems unified. The detail takes over the narrative when we get closer to the work and the pasted photographs then use their significant force to embark us, in the manner of a totally free drawing, in a multitude of stories, associations, references and memories. In the viewer's field of vision appear, from then on, a crowd of images like so many reminiscences belonging to our personal histories and to the great collective narratives.

Painting, drawing, collage and photography are merged in the work of Sabine Hertig. And the palettes and the operating modes of these practices differ from the usual conception that we have of them. Indeed, from painting, Sabine Hertig borrows the variations of light, the three-dimensionality of the representation, the superimpositions of pictorial layers (here made of cut-out papers) and the possibility of extending the painting outside its physical frame. From photography she adopts the framing that harmonizes this expansion and, beyond the frame, gives it a reality, a historical mark to the elements pasted on the canvas. The collage comes to thwart this significant aspect of the photography to create, by the association of fragments of images, a new whole, a new reality, a new "atmospheric totality". Finally, through rubbing, sanding or adding ink strokes, Sabine Hertig draws. She modifies the contours, too obvious, of certain fragments of images and brings a new gesture to the collage. She also makes lower layers of collages appear, which will reveal the presence of a temporality specific to the work.

This relationship to time is one of the strengths of Sabine Hertig's works. The artist creates independent spaces with their own narrative framework but paradoxically, because composed of fragments of our visual culture, appear as a digest of our history. Thus we are transported between ancient times, the present and the future. From the past we observe these images that pile up right in front of our eyes and that could depict here a medieval sculpture, there a press photograph, an animal or a myriad of other motifs. The present time is the one of the aesthetic and narrative experience. The future one brings us, by what it comprises of imaginative force, in what the work can project and ambition beyond the physical limits of the painting. The future time brings us, by is imaginative force, in what the artwork can project and reach beyond the physical limits of the painting.

Like an atlas, Sabine Hertig's works are so many doors that we open, so many maps that we unroll in order to imagine worlds, so many environments where the arrangement and composition of things shake up pre-established orders. Here, in the way of the concept of the relativity, Sabine Hertig extends the limits of the painting and its perception as we could distort the time. Her creations are artistic ellipses in which an infinite number of scenarios are played out. Then arises the vertigo: to be faced with an environment of images, a cosmos with a familiar repertory but whose order - moving and unceasingly jostled by the different scales of reading - slips away from us and where we are left to be carried away by the waves, snatched and transported.

These two Formations are a journey in a flow of images. And these constitute worlds in which one can explore and navigate ceaselessly. Worlds made with the matter of our existences. 

Opening of the exhibition Formations (first part) : Saturday September 3, from 5:00 pm

Opening of the exhibition Formations (second part) : Thursday October 6, from 5:00 pm

Download the exhibition press release : here