PRESENTATION: Tatiana Trouvé-From March to May

In her work, Tatiana Trouvé explores the relations between time and space by constructing enigmatic environments founded on logical, architectural, and material distortions. These settings are manifested in large-scale drawings as well as large-scale, site-specific installations. The constant vacillation between the drawings and the sculptural and architectural installations elicits a sense of trickling from one medium to another.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

At the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine in March 2020, Trouvé, isolated in Paris, began a series of daily drawings using inkjet-printed reproductions of various international newspaper front pages as her starting point. As the pandemic marched on, spreading instability and uncertainty throughout the world, Trouvé continued to work ever more methodically in graphite, ink, and linseed oil. Now Tatiana Trouvé presents her new series if works in the exhibition “From March to May”. Trouvé’s project is linked to certain modernist traditions. Connecting daily realities to poetry and the Symbolist movement, Pablo Picasso utilized scraps of “Le Figaro” in Cubist drawings and collages that used aleatory haphazardness to literally dematerialize neatly formatted columns of type into a chaotic jumble. In Hannah Höch’s provocative collages, newspaper cut-ups represent a feminist challenge to and reclamation of society’s dominant images and narrative. Her new series extend these themes and connect them to Trouvé’s own temporality, while also underscoring the role that technological reproduction and human intervention play in shaping aesthetic experience. In another departure from her modernist forebears, Trouvé’s drawings are fundamentally rooted in today’s digital age; they acknowledge the instant and universal connection that online newspaper editions provided during the pandemic. As print issues became increasingly difficult to obtain in a world halted by quarantine, it was the ubiquity of digital media that allowed the news to circulate into people’s homes and lives despite the constrictive realities of isolation, thus taking on an even more precious and profound status. Trouvé uses the newspaper like a serialized canvas, layering lines and figurative drawings over each formatted and printed front page from around the world. Beneath drawn and painted marks, ominous headlines swirl in and out of legibility, and familiar photographs mix surreally with Trouvé’s visions. Her drawings are both guided and interrupted by the arbitrary form of the printed page, inflecting the pragmatic character of newsprint with a dreamlike quality. In this suite of fifty-six works on paper, exterior and interior worlds fuse into one. Like Trouvé’s large-scale installations and sculptures, “From March to May” series tests the exchange between memory and matter, combining abstract and quotidian elements. Sometimes immersive, sometimes setting the viewer at a distance, Trouvé’s art creates both real and imagined spaces that unsettle and distort standardized structures and perceptions of time.

Photo: Tatiana Trouvé, April 30th, El País, Spain; La Stampa, Italy, from the series From March to May, 2020, Inkjet print and pencil on paper, 16 ⅝ × 23 ¼ inches (42.1 × 59.1 cm), © Tatiana Trouvé. Photo: Florian Kleinefenn, Courtey the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 18/9-30/10/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com