2 min
Projection Space (“Espace de projection”) by Elodie Seguin
Since she began making art, Elodie Seguin has been exploring new ways of understanding painting and sculpture through her installations. Choosing to use a small production and a unique presentation of her pieces, her constant and ongoing research is frozen in time at the moment of the exhibition.
The art of ambivalence
Born in Paris in 1984, Élodie Seguin is a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Villa Arson in Nice. Represented by Galerie Jocelyn Wolff since 2010, this contemporary artist interrogates the notion of representativeness in works of art.
Drawing in turn on the codes of minimalism, found-object and site-specific art in works combining sculpture, painting and installation, it is impossible to definitively classify her work. Often reduced to the bare bones, her works consist of simple materials which she arranges with great complexity depending on her installations, following her own formal grammar. Her work Espace de Projection (2012) can be seen as a sculpture, but also as a physical and optical experience in its own right.
A work like a snapshot
The exhibition area is split down the middle by a glass wall, separating a collection of cardboard tubes, wood and paints on one side from a large, monochrome pink panel painted on the back wall.
Through the play of the reflection across the central window, the two spaces mingle to form a snapshot. The work reproduces a vision that appeared to the artist in a friend’s studio garden, where the wall of the garden was reflected in the studio window, superimposing the pink colour of the exterior wall over the works and materials stored inside.
At once concrete and elusive, Espace de projection is designed as a unique moment, crystallised in the time and space of exhibit.
Between painting, sculpture and installation
Elodie Seguin rarely considers the physical limitations of her works, constantly blurring the lines between painting, sculpture and installation. Although it is still based in a great pictorial strength, Élodie Seguin’s works always focus on the idea of spatialisation and this constant dialogue between the work and its exhibition space.
Her work is distinguished by this intermingling: drawing a distinction between the work and its exhibition space is often made impossible, rather each appears to reveal the other in a skilfully orchestrated game of chance.
Art Basel 2012
Elodie Seguin considers her works to be both in a perpetual state of development and also unique creations, closely linked to the space in which they are exhibited and which cannot be redisplayed multiple times in the same form.
Espace de projection was created and presented in 2012 in the Art Statements section at the Art Basel International Contemporary Art Fair in Basel. Designed and produced on-site, as with all of her works, she incorporates the unique features of her production and exhibition locations.
“yes not” by Élodie Seguin is the artist’s first personal exhibition to be presented on the South American continent. It was held in 2019 at the Museo d’Arte Contemporáneo (MACBA) in Buenos Aires, which acquired several of her works. This project was supported as part of the programme dedicated to individual exhibitions by French artists.