Sarah Tritz, Capriccio cherche comtesse

View of the Sarah Tritz exhibition "Capriccio cherche comtesse", Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2008. Image: Aurélien Mole

This exhi­bi­tion is real­ized in part­ner­ship with Leroy Merlin

In order to set Bétonsalon within its social and geo­graph­ical con­text - which is com­posed of indus­trial archi­tec­ture, housing and shops - the artist Sarah Tritz will be working on site for fif­teen days to realize a work of art made of breeze-blocs and bricks amongst other mate­rials, cre­ating an instal­la­tion within the walls of the gallery.

Different kind of activ­i­ties will be per­formed within the exhi­bi­tion, such as work­shops, guided tours, gigs… For instance, the artist has been invited to pro­gramme a series of "rendez-vous", an oppor­tu­nity to wel­come the input of sev­eral authors whose prac­tices will high­light the work of Sarah Tritz. It is also a way to sup­port emerging authors and com­posers who will pro­duce orig­inal inter­ven­tions responding to Sarah Tritz’ s invi­ta­tion.

Sarah Tritz was born in 1980. She lives and works in Paris. She has recently exhib­ited her work at the Maison du livre, de l’image et du son (Villeurbanne, 2008), at La suite (Chateau-Thierry, 2007) and at La Station (Nice 2006) as part of col­lec­tive exhi­bi­tions. She had her first solo exhi­bi­tion, Un joyeux­naufrage!, at the Espace d’art con­tem­po­rain Camille Lambert of Juvisy/Orge, and has just com­pleted a res­i­dency in Berlin at ’Visite ma tente’, a res­i­dency founded by SMP (Marseille). Capriccio cherche comtesse is her first solo exhi­bi­tion in Paris.

View of the Sarah Tritz exhibition "Capriccio cherche comtesse", Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2008. Image: Aurélien Mole

The works of Sarah Tritz pre­sent them­selves as com­posite wholes shaped by an orig­inal rhythm that is each time par­tic­ular to them. This rhythm is close to a mood, like an internal music, and serves to organise - from the inside - a play of forms that on leaving this cod­i­fied arrange­ment appear to return to their ini­tial obscu­rity. From the out­side, the group strug­gles to agree; nothing moves. Our eyes hesi­tate, stumble, shocked by cer­tain pre­sumed affini­ties. Elements even seem to clash. From the inside, they all take their proper place. A cir­cu­la­tion is estab­lished, our eyes follow its path and links come to life. We are invited to expe­ri­ence.

In fact the group func­tions organ­i­cally. The engine behind this bur­geoning dis­play of life is the imag­i­na­tion. An imag­i­na­tion that is backed up by the will to create order. The raw mate­rial (meaning the rem­nants of past expe­ri­ences) is made up of all kinds of doc­u­ments, auto­bi­o­graph­ical or fic­tional, as suits, and of objects found, mod­i­fied or pro­duced. This ini­tial raw mate­rial sim­mers away from day to day to sub­se­quently be built and rebuilt at the mercy of newly pro­duced instal­la­tions. To give form to life, to one’s own life, is a task that must con­stantly be under­taken anew. In this sense, we wit­ness a blooming forth that is con­stantly expanding and that mobilises a dynamic net­work between on the one hand, our emo­tional con­nec­tion with the world and the exac­er­ba­tion of feeling, trans­lated by forms that are con­stantly moving between the appear­ance of being flat and the two-dimen­sional, and are com­pletely con­se­crated to sight; and on the other, the search for a plas­ticity con­se­crated to touch; and it is all swept up in an effort to unite so that the whole stands firm. Things become fixed. From this unity, there then emerges an invi­ta­tion to resus­ci­tate the play of forms that ini­tially appeared to be “half-dead”. After the almighty cre­ative power of the game, we call to the other. Without this, nothing would exist.

We must take Sarah Tritz at her word. The clue is in the title: she places her­self under the sign of caprice. Meaning what? Caprice, or capriccio, refers to a genre of painting which is gen­er­ally asso­ci­ated with rococo, and of which the par­tic­u­larity is to rep­re­sent land­scapes punc­tu­ated with ruins. The ruins are on the whole invented, trun­cated and arranged according to the demands of the com­po­si­tion of the painting; or simply copied from real edi­fices, but inevitably placed in a fic­tional con­text that favours a sense of the bizarre and of strange and fan­tas­tical asso­ci­a­tions. In the end, the archi­tec­tures that are painted are always imag­i­nary.
At first glance, one thinks one is looking at an ode to the past. Very quickly it is the his­tor­ical sen­ti­ment that pre­dom­i­nates, the events are fil­tered and reshaped by the artist, the pro­cesses of trans­for­ma­tion gov­erned only by the artist’s fancy. It would seem that Sarah Tritz shares a family like­ness with the caprice. But do not see a delib­erate method in this. Rather an other music, the intro­duc­tion of a new rhythm searching for res­o­nances.

Clara Pacquet
Translated by Elizaveta Boutakova

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