Princely apartments, Château
Jocelyne Alloucherie
Ombres de nuit/Ombres de jour"
published at 16/11/2018
For several years now, Jocelyne Alloucherie has been working on the notion of landscape and architecture through photography and sculpture. In her installation pieces, Alloucherie toys with the relationship between the exhibition site and the onlooker. Through complex configurations, her work conceptually and poetically explores the concepts associated with image, object and place. Her night shadows are a tremendous play on light, stone and plants that she transfigures by offering up dream-like images in movement.
“We have all probably already seen this image of the moon, white on black, one day – when it appears drowned in shadow, half swallowed up by it. While the dark side seems to be steadily sliding towards the rawest inexistence, the light part stands strikingly out. In fact, it does so in such a blatant way that the dissolution of all matter we see in the other part is all the stronger for it. It is as if there is a sort of sculpture under threat from a nothingness that is still active, growing. In this image, sculptural form and clear image end up emerging together. For they owe this twin birth to the shadow from which both have come about – the image has become all the clearer because it seems to extricate itself from the void, and the sculpture takes on even more voluptuous forms since it stems from the same emptiness.
Here, the shadow is apparently the mother of both photography and sculpture.
In "Ombres de nuit/Ombres de jour" lNight shadows, day shadows) the link seems even more destructive. The shadow cast over the stonework splits it and turns a smooth surface into a sculpted mass. Between these fibrous silhouettes, each wall buckles, reels and brings its depth to the fore. What’s more, the frayed shadows reveal other three-dimensional forms watching over distant trees, branches and habitats. Yes, these are images, but this is so as to be even better over there, behind where the scene was captured, real and dense matter.
It is as if the sculpture was revealed by the shadows, whereas the images created by them were denying its existence. This intentional indecisiveness, evident in all of Jocelyne Alloucherie’s work, is play and fluctuation. This is all the more the case when you notice that some of the blocks worked, with architectural undertones, do not merely make do with jutting out over or opening on to images. They are sometimes cloaked in the folds of a veil, a fully fledged shroud bearing the arabesques of a minimum image also composed of shadow motifs. The same crafty game led to the creation of these canvases, for we know full well that the image cast upon them is the result of inlaying, that it is made up of hardened materials. Veil and screen, the canvas conceals and reveals, Undulating matter, it is also, for the image, instability itself, emphasising the temporary character of that which another always replaces.
In this way, the media end up at a sort of reciprocal, planned cancelling out, and this ultimately projects us directly into the forms and the things which, as created as they are, present themselves as effects of the world itself”. Sylvain Campeau, November 2013.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Jocelyne ALLOUCHERIE
CANADA
Born in Quebec in Canada in 1947, Jocelyne Alloucherie lives and works in Montreal.
She uses a range of media, particularly sculpture and photography, in complex, ever renewed configurations. She is considered to be one of the best Canadian artists.
Since 1973, Jocelyne Alloucherie has presented her work through several personal exhibitions.
She is represented in France by the Galerie Françoise Paviot.
