Claire Trotignon

Claire Trotignon's collage work should be seen as a successful attempt to talk about our times in a different way. It shows a happy collision between elements from the past and forms that are clearly from the future. Nothing in her works seems to evoke our present, or even refer to an event or to a shift in our culture. She composes each of her landscapes from hundreds of fragments of 19th-century engravings, which she cuts out meticulously before gluing, arranging and distributing them in a scattered fashion on a pure white background. The assemblages depict rocky outcrops, mountains, and cliffs. Some are reduced to a few elements with no precise location. And there is always a tree, or even a grove, to define scale. White radiates all around, leaving things in suspense. For Claire Trotignon, emptiness is the very basis of composition, refuting any form of gravity. Things float freely, ruling out any clearly defined horizon, or even a constraining converging line. The frame therefore appears to be an arbitrary cut-out.

The collages captivate the gaze with their architecture, or more precisely, the ghosts of structures. From one series to another, they become more abstract, to the point of becoming either archaic structures of ancient peoples or the minimalist evidence of utopian architectures, regularly adorned with brushstrokes of intense blue. These arches, blind walls, pits and esplanades, these endless perspectives evoke a levitating future world where reality seems to have lost all substance, scattered in the folds of time and therefore of our imagination. Claire Trotignon reaffirms that any landscape, particularly an urban one, is a mental construct before all else, in which the issues of representation in a given culture crystallise. By playing with the idea of history and cycles, and drawing on non-Western modes of representation (Japanese prints in particular come to mind), her collages ultimately produce an image where past and future seem to cancel each other out in the ruins of the present. For the landscapes composed by Claire Trotignon are obviously metaphorical, and also reflect the fragmentation of our contemporary cultures.

Her recent work has entered a phase of metamorphosis. While fragments of old engravings still form the basis of her collages, her compositions now have an unparalleled breadth and scale thanks to the collision of varied elements. The traditional perspective-based point of view gives way to a new space-time. The backgrounds, previously white and neutral, are enriched with bright colours, including a luminous blue. Within these blocks of colour, suspended architectural fragments inspired by classical ancient architecture float freely in the void, defusing the idea of a romantic landscape. Always driven by a musical rhythm, these new works offer opportunities to rethink Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space.

At the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire, Claire Trotignon's drawings are taking over the Lower Le Fenil Gallery. “The site marked me with its panoramic dual aspect. I instinctively saw a landscape stretching out lengthways, almost to the point of creating a fine thread linking two ends of an archipelago, a landscape balancing between telluric forces and delicately interwoven embroidery”, shares the artist. The installation was created especially for the occasion and took a long time to complete. First there was the preparatory work: fragments of engravings combined with drawings, all transposed into silkscreen and printed by hand on Arches paper, in a charcoal black that reintroduces the materiality of the engraving. The result is proportional to the space and divided into a dozen panels laminated on Dibond to give a harmonious continuity to the design, on which the artist then worked directly, adorning the work with collages and original drawings. A panoramic landscape like no other work by Claire Trotignon.

Claire Trotignon was born in Paris in 1985 and is one of the most talented artists of her generation. She graduated with honours from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Tours in 2008, working at the intersection of landscape and architecture. The artist draws in space and builds on paper. Through drawing and cut-outs, she extends the line and structure with recomposed fragments and creates collisions between heterogeneous elements, shattering the traditional perspective-based aspect and linear narration to create a new space-time. Her work has been exhibited in France and abroad (Venice Biennale of Architecture, FIAC, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Untitled Miami). She has had several solo exhibitions in French institutions (Le SHED-CAC, FRAC IDF, Centre Pompidou Metz).

Claire Trotignon lives and works in Tours. She is represented by Galerie 8+4, Paris, and Galerie La Patinoire Royale-Bach, Brussels.