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2007, Damien Sausset extract of the text of presentation (UK) |
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ABSOLUTELY ALIVE
Natalie Lamotte uses her painting -- with power and reserve, grace and severity -- to express the necessity of using our eyes. She does this not by a new approach to representation to be added to all those that have already characterised the history of art, but rather with the desire to draw from the painting the means to reassess our world. Natalie Lamotte’s canvasses mobilise the eyes, call them, animate them and make them watchful. It is not a question therefore of building images that convoke reality, but rather to demonstrate that the reality of the image is itself the access to the reality. To do this, no representation, nor even the will to transcend by abstraction, can intervene. This would pull the painting back into the vision. Natalie Lamotte makes neither the image nor the symbol disappear, but gives them equivalents, mobilising these towards the eyes, and the eyes towards reality. Obviously, these canvasses set down forms.
They are, however, without attachment, and can be perceived as so many evocations of the world of the senses, so that it is possible to read them as flowers, fragments of a microscopic reality suddenly revealed, or as those oh-so intimate folds of the human body, the lips replete with vitality; unless they are in fact the violence of the exposed flesh? It is difficult to decide. But that isn’t important.
Damien SAUSSET, 2007
Art critic collaboration in ArtPress and Connaissances des Arts.
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