PARIS.- The work of Gaëlle Choisne is an address to the disorder of the world. Impervious to pessimism and catastrophism, Choisne mirrors the complexity of our contemporary era through multiple medias and materials that she will fashion and organize into sprawling installations, blending sculptures, images and referential systems that conflate within bountiful environments inhabited by the artist’s gestures.
Between occult tales and scientific objectivity, from the Carribean to the European literary traditions, Gaëlle Choisne navigates her way amongst layered mindscapes, as composite as the techniques implemented to make them come to life : molding, baking, print, hanging, collage, twisting, extraction. Choisne’s keen interest in the work process is quite often left to be seen in the installations-sculpturesimages, which are always verging on the experimental. As though the work, lost in a never-ending gestation, might never reach a definitive status in its layout, its form or its reproducibility. As though its relevance was to be found in the discontinued transformation, the steady reversal of media, meanings and surfaces. Such practice of continued becoming, in which the meaning can only emerge through perpetual motion, works through palpation and always seems animated, inhabited by an organic, biomorphic energy. The hand that fingers, moves and alters may be seen as distorting a deceptively naïve craft.
By her taking possession and interbreeding of Creole myths, legends, cultures and subcultures, Choisne is asking the question : What is knowing? The mixing and counterfeiting of the vernacular, the popular, the scientific and the intimate are indeed akin to an act of reappropriation, a takeover that aims to reveal the systems through which knowledge and beings are characterized, while putting them at a distance. Through displacements and contaminations, the artist builds a perverse taxonomy that mocks the Western obsession with archiving and classification. Such reclaiming and owning of the legacy of the colonial histories, the effects of capitalism on the living, as well as the folklores, the mercantile exoticism, the imperialistic remains and all sorts of industrial productions (cultural commodities and goods) outline a mirror image of the question of the body as a space of resistance and submission to those phenomena.
Often rather suggested than presented, the body seeps ubiquitously into the work of Gaelle Choisne. The mere porosity of the materials, their modified, treated surfaces, the permissiveness that is expressed in the pieces, all are manifestations of the pervasiveness of the human in the objects and images. The display, always raw, at times brutal, reminds us of the frailty of the bodies confronted to the cultural and social manifestations that overwhelms them. Oriented and revealed by the installation, the eye of the beholder, finally, will be the one to activate the whole apparatus by imposing its choice, its position, its power and its guilt.
Gaëlle Choisne is a French artist born in 1985 in Cherbourg. Diplômée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (2013). She is a 2013 graduate from Lyon’s School of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Paris and Amsterdam, where she is attending the Rijksakademie since January 2017.
