ANTWERP.- Developed around simple gestures in the tradition of the artistic genre (carving, cutting, assembling, stacking, etc.), using wood as her preferred material, Julia Cottin’s sculptural work finds its references in architecture, using its symbols (the column) and its archetypes.

For the Galerie Valerie Traan, the artist has designed new works, reactivating the installation of columns that invert construction standards and extend her reflections on natural and constructed space.

The title she has chosen for the exhibition, The Word for World is Forest, is a reference to a short science fiction novel published by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1972, which explores our relationship with the environment and offers anti-colonialist viewpoint. It is also a journey into the civilization of the Athseans, part of whose existence is spent in the dream world, under the canopies of the great trees, and who, before the arrival of humans, knew no violence.

As a continuation of her work on architectural standards based on archive images, Julia Cottin has produced drawings in Indian ink showing details of the architecture of the Beau Rivage hotel on France’s west coast. A typical hotel from the 1950s, with shutters on the ground floor, stonework and alternating geometric balustrades forming sunscreens. The façade is a clear example of modern architecture. The whiteness of the balustrades forming an abstract image created by the interplay of shadows and repetitions.

For the installation of 7 sculpted wooden columns wedged between the floor and ceiling of the gallery, the artist retained the elements that are typical of the composition of a column: base, shaft, capital. But this vocabulary of classical architecture is superseded by the random distribution of the vertical segments, their crude construction and the symbolic function they are granted.

Traditionally associated, in the history of architecture, with a role of monumental support and often a symbol of academic elevation, the column here takes on the appearance of a prop, the value of a building element that temporarily supports a load.

Julia Cottin is inspired by Romanesque and Oriental columns found in mosques. As in all the artist’s sculptures, the metaphorical significance (the inscription of a natural space in a built space; the meeting of the Western and Eastern worlds; the reversed power supported by a naturalistic topography, etc.) is counterbalanced by a strong pragmatic dimension (balance of forces, resistance of the material, the question of functionality, human scale).

Julia Cottin emphasises the archaeological dimension of her work and her desire to superimpose different eras of form and architecture. Accolade is a play on words and shapes, recalling the accolades carved on window lintels or the formal vocabulary of Brancusi’s sculptures. These 3 carved oak beams are stretched between two tightening straps, a humorous way of putting modern sculpture at bay.

Cataclop is a wooden sculpture that suggests movement, a dance step or a horse’s stride and the sound that emanates from it. Cataclop evokes the constant re establishment, as far as we can, of the imbalance that inhabits us all and that we must constantly reconcile.

In Vie des formes, Henri Focillon writes of the nature of a work of art that is not solely inscribed in space: ‘it is not enough to say that it takes in space. Rather ‘the work of art is the measure of space. It is form, and this is what must be considered first and foremost’. Body and space interact.

By experimenting with rudimentary formal materials, the artist also brings her own body into play in some of the works on show, with the sometimes zany, sometimes serious idea of taking measure of the world.

The test pattern that appears almost systematically in archaeological photographs is stretched here to the artist’s height of 172 cm, cast in ceramic plaster and used to measure the exhibition space like a standard body.

Born in 1981 in Chalon-sur-Saône (Saône-et-Loire), Julia Cottin lives and works in Paris.