French artist Agathe de Bailliencourt’s solo exhibition Water, Colour, Recordings dealt with the question of horizon as one of painting’s most basic acts in defining time, space, and a scale of infinity. The exhibition unveils new works from her ongoing series Couleur du Temps, which was born during an artist residency at Marfa, Texas. By applying an extended version of watercolor-technique on untreated linen canvas, de Bailliencourt turns the perspective of a romantic tradition of landscape painting, the imagination of a distant past, towards an open futurist vision. The untreated linen fibre reacts to the painting material in an extremely sensitive and almost uncontrollable way. At the same time, every action is irreversibly visible, laying bare the entire procedure of producing an image of a landscape.
Through an elaborate method of repetitive movements, of slow sedimentation of color and of recording the process itself, the artist establishes the landscape with a single horizontal line, reminding the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto. The paintings are built up as a complex layering of somehow responsive shades of color. More than creating an image, Agathe de Bailliencourt creates a context, an environment that is open for the viewer. In her own words, the artist sees the work as an intuitive exploration for an area that shifts the experience of materiality and depth towards something beyond, something beyond inside and outside.
