Objets trouvés: the artist’s drawings are recreated as installations
The South London Gallery’s main space is dominated by two towering spindly structures made from twig-like copper rods. At the top of one perches a small crumpled black parcel-like object. Beside it, tall black zigzags of what looks like electrical cable rise and fall from the floor, like a graph of volatile share movements or a haywire life-support machine. On the walls are some large gloomy drawings, executed mostly in black charcoal on a black ground. In one, an empty garden lounger sits inexplicably in a clearing in a wild landscape.
The work of Tatiana Trouvé—a 42-year-old Italian-born, Paris-based contemporary artist, who has a solo show at the gallery until 28th November—is frustratingly difficult to describe. Her art, with its delicate poetics of material and form, does exactly what contemporary art should be doing today. But what is that?
Explaining why an artist’s work is good is one of the great taboos of contemporary art criticism. One may describe what it looks like, why it is interesting, or what the artist thinks they are doing. Yet few critics tackle the only important question: what makes the good stuff good? Trouvé is brilliant. But why?
As happens so often, the artist and her official interpreters are no help. Trouvé, who has had solo shows at the Pompidou (2008) and Gagosian’s New York gallery (2010), says the idea behind this exhibition was to “recreate” some of her previous drawings as sculptures and installations. A catalogue essay pronounces on her radical expansion of drawing into three dimensions. But this kind of formal genre-bending never explains the power of art. The gallery guide tells us the artist “reconfigures and modifies spaces… introducing shifts in scale and detail which transform our understanding and experience of them.” It seems a little self-regarding of the South London Gallery to imagine that we are interested in their space, even if they have got a brand new extension. I can never work out if contemporary artists and their curators are disingenuous, coy, inarticulate, or if they really don’t have a clue how the art works.
The key is a small piece bang in the middle of the gallery, part-sculpture, part-readymade: the blackened wheel of a car cast in bronze, with a tyre still attached that looks like it’s just been blown up. Spikes of rubber protrude like petals, angled as if the wheel is still in motion: a beautiful freeze-frame of violence. Low on another wall hangs a twisted loop of dark black rag, this time made of resin, which made me think of the charred remains of clothing like a girl’s headband. In one corner Trouvé has gouged an arcing line like a knife wound deep into the gallery wall. On either side are softly shaded burn marks, probably created with a blowtorch. Elsewhere two black parcels tied up with string—it’s all cast in bronze, by the way—are tacked up on the wall, like relics that have survived a fire. A post-apocalyptic atmosphere pervades much of the work, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or of news footage of suicide bombings. Like all great contemporary artists, Trouvé has created works that are unmistakably about the world we live in, though all she will admit to is being interested in remnants and memory.
Before I get accused of crass literalism, these realities are not the true subject. Rather, they are the framework for an abstract project. The work that looked like a girl’s headband could be an arrangement of a twisted rag soaked in oil. Elsewhere, thick planks of wood sit on mounds of soft tarmac, while cascades of yellowed greasy liquid pour down a wall, at once dirty and glowing, in a canny reversioning of the colourful “pours” of the American abstract painter Morris Louis. Trouvé just uses what’s in her studio, and these works are about materials when they come into contact with each other: when something soft is squished by something heavy, when flames singe plasterboard, when liquids flow, when fires flare.
We are almost at the heart of her work—but not quite. There’s plenty of postwar heritage for art based on material and process. Trouvé’s is packed with the flavours of Joseph Beuys: the German artist, big in the 1970s and 1980s, who created elegaic protests against the industrial age from fat, felt and old bits of machinery. But Trouvé is not an imitator or revivalist. She has left Beuys’s ecological symbolism and rough aesthetics behind. Her materials may be modest but her handling is meticulous and refined. Now, the symbolism resides in what she is doing to these materials—her gestures, as an art theorist would say. These carry an emotional, even moral charge. The enchantment of her work comes from the way she relinquishes and retains control, tenderly preserving the temporary, making the accidental deliberate and the violent delicate.
The South London Gallery’s main space is dominated by two towering spindly structures made from twig-like copper rods. At the top of one perches a small crumpled black parcel-like object. Beside it, tall black zigzags of what looks like electrical cable rise and fall from the floor, like a graph of volatile share movements or a haywire life-support machine. On the walls are some large gloomy drawings, executed mostly in black charcoal on a black ground. In one, an empty garden lounger sits inexplicably in a clearing in a wild landscape.
The work of Tatiana Trouvé—a 42-year-old Italian-born, Paris-based contemporary artist, who has a solo show at the gallery until 28th November—is frustratingly difficult to describe. Her art, with its delicate poetics of material and form, does exactly what contemporary art should be doing today. But what is that?
Explaining why an artist’s work is good is one of the great taboos of contemporary art criticism. One may describe what it looks like, why it is interesting, or what the artist thinks they are doing. Yet few critics tackle the only important question: what makes the good stuff good? Trouvé is brilliant. But why?
As happens so often, the artist and her official interpreters are no help. Trouvé, who has had solo shows at the Pompidou (2008) and Gagosian’s New York gallery (2010), says the idea behind this exhibition was to “recreate” some of her previous drawings as sculptures and installations. A catalogue essay pronounces on her radical expansion of drawing into three dimensions. But this kind of formal genre-bending never explains the power of art. The gallery guide tells us the artist “reconfigures and modifies spaces… introducing shifts in scale and detail which transform our understanding and experience of them.” It seems a little self-regarding of the South London Gallery to imagine that we are interested in their space, even if they have got a brand new extension. I can never work out if contemporary artists and their curators are disingenuous, coy, inarticulate, or if they really don’t have a clue how the art works.
The key is a small piece bang in the middle of the gallery, part-sculpture, part-readymade: the blackened wheel of a car cast in bronze, with a tyre still attached that looks like it’s just been blown up. Spikes of rubber protrude like petals, angled as if the wheel is still in motion: a beautiful freeze-frame of violence. Low on another wall hangs a twisted loop of dark black rag, this time made of resin, which made me think of the charred remains of clothing like a girl’s headband. In one corner Trouvé has gouged an arcing line like a knife wound deep into the gallery wall. On either side are softly shaded burn marks, probably created with a blowtorch. Elsewhere two black parcels tied up with string—it’s all cast in bronze, by the way—are tacked up on the wall, like relics that have survived a fire. A post-apocalyptic atmosphere pervades much of the work, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or of news footage of suicide bombings. Like all great contemporary artists, Trouvé has created works that are unmistakably about the world we live in, though all she will admit to is being interested in remnants and memory.
Before I get accused of crass literalism, these realities are not the true subject. Rather, they are the framework for an abstract project. The work that looked like a girl’s headband could be an arrangement of a twisted rag soaked in oil. Elsewhere, thick planks of wood sit on mounds of soft tarmac, while cascades of yellowed greasy liquid pour down a wall, at once dirty and glowing, in a canny reversioning of the colourful “pours” of the American abstract painter Morris Louis. Trouvé just uses what’s in her studio, and these works are about materials when they come into contact with each other: when something soft is squished by something heavy, when flames singe plasterboard, when liquids flow, when fires flare.
We are almost at the heart of her work—but not quite. There’s plenty of postwar heritage for art based on material and process. Trouvé’s is packed with the flavours of Joseph Beuys: the German artist, big in the 1970s and 1980s, who created elegaic protests against the industrial age from fat, felt and old bits of machinery. But Trouvé is not an imitator or revivalist. She has left Beuys’s ecological symbolism and rough aesthetics behind. Her materials may be modest but her handling is meticulous and refined. Now, the symbolism resides in what she is doing to these materials—her gestures, as an art theorist would say. These carry an emotional, even moral charge. The enchantment of her work comes from the way she relinquishes and retains control, tenderly preserving the temporary, making the accidental deliberate and the violent delicate.
