Paysage / Alors, il y a cette île

print on vinyl banner, light box, wooden frame 304 x 239 x 50 cm
wall drawing in graphite, variable dimensions

The work Landscape (2007), a large light box firmly anchored to the gallery floor, illuminates a photograph of a Scottish plateau—a vast, arid expanse swept by wind and clouds.

But that’s not all. The light diffusing from the photographic box discreetly illuminates a mass floating on one of the walls of the art center: it is a wall drawing created by the artist in graphite, a sketch of a block in the process of forming, suggesting movement, modulation, an emergence—or, conversely, a fading away. From this mass emerges the following inscription: So, there is this island.

Hence this other observation regarding overflow: the drawing escapes its own condition as “disegno”—that is, the attempt at a perfect and ideal representation of reality. First of all, a drawing is not a line but a formless mass. Next, when the drawing becomes a line, it does so solely in its capacity as writing. This written form embodies another paradox: it acquires a graphic dimension not simply to signify, describe, and convey meaning, but rather to visualize the beginning of a dissemination of the letter and the image. Indeed, the “root” typography designed by Jocelyn Cottencin engages the work in a process of proliferation and transformation.  Drawing, graphic design, and writing thus find their essence in the material quality of the formless and in the performative act of enunciation rather than in that of description or explanation. Or how to visualize what lies beyond writing and visual representation. The statement itself—“So, there’s this island”—is by no means an explicit narrative: rather than an exotic reference, it evokes a sense of elsewhere, an insularity directly embedded in the art center’s architecture and at the heart of the visitor’s subjective experience.

Elsewhere takes place right here: self-care and the making of art. In Jocelyn Cottencin’s proposal, the notion of a possessed and defined territoriality collapses in favor of the qualities inherent to insularity—namely, beneficial drifting, openness to the strange, and the passage between spaces that are inevitably contradictory.