ART CITIES:Paris-Agnès Thurnauer

Through her paintings, sculptures and installations, Agnès Thurnauer deals with the question of language. In her pictorial practice, writing is often integrated into the painting and even when it is not, the allusive force that emanates from the subject places the viewer in the history of art as well as in the ever-renewed emancipation of his own reading.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Michel Rein Gallery Archive

For Agnès Thurnauer, the relationship to the work always induces a form of reciprocity. If the work reads the world, it is up to each of us to make our own reading of it. This shared language is at the heart of society and gives art a powerful poetic and political function. Different series of works by Agnès Thurnauer are on show in her solo exhibition “La Traverser” . The series  “Portraits Grandeur Nature” give a name to migrants of the genre of art history. In the form of badges, Agnès Thurnauer creates a series of portraits of outstanding artists of the 20th century, which declines the style on the singular mode of the genre. “The Portraits Grandeur Nature enlarge the shape of the badge to copy”, says the artist, “that of the Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, from Parmesan. These portraits of names produce an almost inexhaustible register”. The “Big-big & Bang-bang” series, started in 1995, runs through all her work. These anthropomorphic forms are set on a threshold, in front of the painting and in front of time. Mostly twosomes, they anchor the relation in its primary authenticity. The series “Predelles” because they are often also double, provide the word like a crossing from one format to another. When you learn a language, you mumble the syllables, when you read it, you make a tracking shot in the writing. The caesura expresses this act of overcoming that you invariably execute in the reading, between the graphic form and the meaning, between signifier and signified. The “Créolisations internes” series lends a face to these figures. Woven with excerpts from Paul. B. Preciado in Un Appartement sur Uranus — one of the books she has been most affected by latterly,  they call into question this attribution of gender at work in art history. In re-enacting certain portraits by Matisse, who so often dealt with the female model, these faces express the voice of the crossing. “Land and Language” is a series of large paintings that deal with the question of migration and how the body becomes the territory that carries the mother tongue between its edges. Woven from the words of the poet Rod Mengham, the composition revolves around a large diagonal referring to historical paintings such as The Raft of the Jellyfish, and the colors are used pure, out of the tube, and often superimposed with their complements. The result is a singular chromatic stridence that also carries the violence of the subject. The planetary geography is thus in motion, and the borders are moved by the bodies that cross them, becoming themselves territories and languages in their own right.

Graduated from the National School of Decorative Arts in 1985, Agnès Thurnauer received training in cinema and video which undoubtedly contributes to her very broad vision of essentially pictorial practice, which, according to the artist, must and can feed on other media.Since the mid-1990s – she begins a regular studio production with paintings on free canvas without primer, with minimal inscription – until today, where she alternates abstraction, figuration, collages, inscriptions, she does not stops questioning painting by weaving a vast semantic canvas, regularly invoking installation, video, photography, in the development of a pictorial metalanguage.She pushes back the limits and possibilities of the painting; questions the place it can take in the contemporary world.From 1998, A. Thurnauer definitively integrates language into his painting.“To represent a question is to allow yourself to look at it as a landscape,” she explains.From now on, in his works, words and forms are intertwined, in resonance, equivalent. She readily claims to be Robert Filliou, whose work is a labyrinth of signs and traces that mark the incessant flow of a process of vital production.Thus, his workshop is a site where everything fits, answers, is recycled.Among the recurring words in different paintings appear, in the 2000s, the names of famous artists, whose first names she feminized (Miss van der Hohe, Francine Picabia) – a potentially infinite alternative list which will then reappear in volume, on wall sculptures in the form of badges.

Photo: Agnès Thurnauer, Predelle (border #1), 2018, 2 elements, acrylic on canvas, wooden frame, each: 57 x 35 cm, unique artwork, signed, titled, dated, © Agnès Thurnauer, Courteys the artist and Michel Rein Gallery

Info: Michel Rein, 42 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 31/10-23/12/200, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, michelrein.com