PARIS.- For this monograph at the Centre Pompidou, Tatiana Trouvé was invited to take over the approximately eight hundred square metres of Galerie 3. This exhibition space is structured and recomposed by drawing, which has been at the heart of the artist's work since she first began. Whether hanging on the walls or suspended from the ceiling, all of these drawings in a variety of presentations, including some large formats specially created for the exhibition, maintain a dialogue with the sculptures, but also with the floor, which the artist has entirely recreated, thus constituting a visual layout that produces an experience of disorientation.

Born in Cosenza (Calabria) in 1968, Tatiana Trouvé spent her childhood in Dakar, Africa, before moving to France where she studied art at Villa Arson (Nice), followed by two years at Ateliers 63 in Haarlem (Netherlands). Today, she is one of the most international artists of her generation and has exhibited all over the world. Her works feature in major public and private collections in France and abroad.

Winner of the Paul Ricard Prize in 2001, she was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2007 and then the Rosa Schapire Award in 2019.

Since moving to Paris in the mid-1990s, Tatiana Trouvé has built a body of work that is as broad as it is ambitious, in which drawing and sculpture intertwine in an endless to-and-fro movement. Her three-dimensional works are based on an invitation to (re)inhabit the space, while her graphic works give life to fragmentary arrangements of architectural constructions, landscapes and furniture that evoke dream-like states and their mechanisms. All of her work is characterized by the abscence of the human figure, although signs of their presence and activity abound. This gives rise to a sense of the aftermath of a disaster, a distinct melancholy unique to this imaginary world drifting between abandonment and the possibility of reconstruction. A form of “memory art” seems to be at work, not based on a technique of memorisation, as was the case in Antiquity or during the Renaissance, but on the fact of forgetting and leaving memory (real or suggested, flashback or illusory déjà-vu) free to be unclarified, like the uncertain theaters created in her drawings in which the set (a cinema effect) and collage (disjunction caused by the heterogeneity of the materials) play an essential role and contribute to producing a general enigma (a series from the 2010s was titled Les Dessouvenus, or “The Unremembered”). The concept of “the interior”, one of the most ambiguous in both construction and psychology, is thus developed as the ultimate site of strangeness.

The Great Atlas of Disorientation

Tatiana Trouvé, in dialogue with Jean-Pierre Criqui, curator of the exhibition, is finalising her latest works and continues to reflect on the details of her exhibition. She sees it as a global installation. Here Jean-Pierre Criqui evokes the artist's main preoccupations for this project.




"Disorientation" is a word that takes effect in the layout presented. Initially insofar as, beyond the vestibule, the Galerie 3 space is left open.

The works presented, most of them drawings, are not hung from picture rails but suspended from the ceiling, thus structuring the space differently. Four very large formats, still being made and thus presented for the first time, are presented back-to back, facilitating a certain ambivalence in terms of points of view.

In addition, the recent series entitled From March to May is presented in the vestibule of Galerie 3. These are fifty-six drawings on the front pages of international dailies, made during the first lockdown, between March and May 2020.

The title of the exhibition is not a reference to a theme, but rather to a mental state in the process of creation and a visual experience that seeks to escape from all forms of confinement.

One of the particularities of the Centre Pompidou is that it provides empty rooms, thus providing a starting point on which to build in accordance with the project. Here the artist takes over some eight hundred square metres to create a total art installation. The space is structured by the way of presenting her works (some thirty drawings and a few sculptures) and using the large windows specific to the Centre Pompidou's Galerie 3. Tatiana Trouvé also creates the floor, which is covered with viroc, a composite material on which she draws. The exhibition is made up of suspended drawings but also drawings on the floor, like a completely drawn landscape. In a certain sense, visitors will walk both on and in a drawing.

Moreover, three curtains extend from ceiling to floor along the glass walls of the Gallery, thus creating an outside and an inside. There is a powerful confusion of the concepts of outside and inside in Tatiana Trouvé's work. She represents a room, a bedroom, but with a tree growing in the middle or a tombstone on the bed. These two concepts are not simply spatial but also psychic.

In conclusion, the exhibition is a kind of total work of art that is made up of all the works brought from the outside and presented, but also shaped by how the artist transforms this space with the floor, with the curtains that divide the space and articulate it. Trouvé’s work provides an experience of an original place that will disappear at the end of the exhibition.