DORNACH PILLARS
Eyes wide open, head down, hanging by a foot, one leg bent – the figure of the hanged man appears. Despite the ambiguity of this major arcana of the tarot, the soft gaze seems to convey self-determination, intuition and great concentration. The gaze towards the inner core. Through reversal, the card invites to go past a heritage of illusions and projections, to lose one’s own reference points in favor of a change of perspective.
This impression of bewilderment, the distance from the familiar, or at least the disruption of a balance that weakens a certain established order, seems to be sought by Élise Lafontaine as she enters closed spaces. Identifiable edifices, their representative and functional architecture covers a reality of their own and excludes sometimes their community from society. These spaces were built to contain, confine or isolate. Prisons, psychiatric hospitals, caves or monasteries – they hold power and knowledge, belief systems, sustained by the State, or spiritual and ideological institutions. Like the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, which Élise Lafontaine visited last – a structure constructed to be a total “embodiement” of the anthroposophical thought.
The recognition of the site passes by processes of identification and anchoring to perhaps end in a kind of communion. Like a pendulum, the artist takes the measure of the architectural and vibratory space, immerses herself in its spatiality, oscillating between perception and sensation until she abolishes the distance between them: “the strange sensory experience contributes to a feeling of dissociation from reality and the movements of my limbs fill the space in a disproportionate scale ratio[1].” An amplified corporality reaches the frescoes of the vaults, sonorities come to fill the memorial gaps, its permeable membranes absorb the surrounding tints. Élise Lafontaine captures the carrier system as well as the infiltrating light rays. Her body, activated by the pictorial gesture, becomes a “synesthetic commutator[2]“. It is the vehicle allowing the translation, like a delicate transfer of relics, of which the Latin root translatio indicates both the transport and the translation. To these “remains” is added a quantity of metaphysical and mystical information, invisible and intangible.
From each visited location, characteristics are added to the paintings. Here, curves and columns structure the marouflaged canvases. Female organs, entrails of concrete – their representativeness is not confined to a single register, nor to their affinity with the works of pioneers of abstraction such as Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) or of concrete art such as Zilia Sánchez (1926). The layers of sandblasted paint reveal the armature of silhouettes, as though filtered by bioluminescent gleams. They are presences. Like the “women statues[3]”, the column paintings of Élise Lafontaine indicate the entrance as much as they redefine the exhibition space – another circumscribed place – as a passage.
If the canvases function as a device of monstration and orientation, Élise Lafontaine reverses them. In the process, she turns her paintings upside down and thus plays with directions, as if to distance herself from the inhabited places or to emancipate herself from identifiable forms. In doing so, she lays the moving foundations of another architecture, born of disorientation : “Disorientation opens a space of difference, between here and there, public and private, profane and sacred, strange and familiar, and so on[4]”.
[1] Élise Lafontaine, Archives, Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK, 2023, p. 50, about her experience at the Lombrives Cave, France.
[2] Sara Petrucci, « Le corps et la géométrie. Visualisations et transformations », in Nombres, rythmes, transformation. Dialogue contemporain avec Emma Kunz, Göttingen : Steidl, 2020 p.62, after Arnauld Pierre.
[3] Agnès Varda, Les dites cariatides, film, 35mm, color, 13 min, 1984.
[4] Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg, Geographies of disorientation, New York: Routledge, 2018, p.3, quoting Bernard Stiegler.
Élise Lafontaine (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada) holds a master’s degree in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2020) and a BFA from Concordia University (2015). She has participated in artist residencies at the Fondation Christoph Merian / CALQ and Malévoz Quartier culturel (Switzerland), at the Vermont Studio Center (United States), and at Leipzig International Art Programme (Germany). Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Sothu Zurich (Switzerland) and at Pangée and Galerie Nicolas Robert (Canada), and in group exhibitions (Centre CLARK, Fondation Rad Hourani, McBride Contemporain, Maison de la culture du Plateau‑Mont‑Royal, Usine C, Galerie Art Mûr, Leipzig Spinnerei Autumn Gallery Tour). In 2023, the Centre CLARK (Canada) will publish her first book Archives where she will present a solo exhibition with guest curator Marie DuPasquier (Zurich and Berlin). In the fall, she will participate in a group exhibition at Soka Art Beijing (China) curated by Jessica Wan (Hong Kong and London). Lafontaine is represented by Pangée.
To read: Élise Lafontaine interview for artfridge.de