FRACTAL SPACE
If we consider that the environment is perceptible only in isolation then, of the world, we record only a fragmented, split up vision.
When Réjane Lhote tries to tame the spaces that surround her, she is inevitably forced to adopt a point of view, to operate a selection. She first scans the location, X-rays its internal skeleton and records the way it is arranged. Next, she opens up and unfurls the walls, lays them bare, exposing them flat on paper. The topography of theses places is then declined in a repertoire of forms.
Visible in sketchbooks, the forms are later transposed to the scale of a wall drawing.
These signs have the appearance of dense black shapes, the sharp edges face the empty white walls. These representations of fragmented spaces are fragile, in tension, they threaten to break. In this sense, Réjane Lhote's drawings falter between synthesis and possible dislocation. They arise from strategies of spacings, from gaps and from inversions. The form which it gives to see on two levels is on the edge, suspended, and dizziness is watching us. The spectator thus experiences this paradoxical situation which consists in discovering in two phases a drawing that unfolds on two spaces.
Justine RICHARD
le Radar, Bayeux, France
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Réjane Lhôte transforms architectural sensations in sensitive situations.
The act of drawing is her means to open and recompose the architectural space.
As she intervenes in situ, directly on the surface of walls or on paper, Réjane's research focuses
on the understanding of a location perceived by the filter of a moving body, shifting between
the technical analysis of drawing and the sensitive reception.
For the artist, drawing embodies the point of convergence and circulation between the body
and the architecture, between the internalization and the deployment.
In the series of self-portraits begun in March, 2015, Réjane Lhôte creates a mise en abîme of her body
put in movement when drawing. In each composition, the real body is in hollow in the figurative one,
only the painted face is modeled in color contrasting with strata of grey from the bust.
The absences on paper are actually the body contours in action; physical and spectral irruption of the reality
in the representation.
It is a similar issue - the confrontation of body-space, organic-geometric - which underlies the installation
Green Office Sessions IV: in situ, the artist invests an all-over green mansard-roofed room. She plays with its
perspectives and soothes its volumes. Peeled wallpaper, graphic interventions on wall and ground surfaces
re-balance the visual tensions present. On the wall, drawings resume the dynamics of the room. Variations
of a volume that has been folded, unfolded and re-folded, the drawings preserve the textures and the forms
about to disappear once the building is demolished.
Series, multiple, variation is an important element in Réjane Lhôte’s work. During a short residency, she is
invited to take for object of study a shed installed in a London loft. With an oral description, without seeing
the setting, Réjane Lhôte tries to understand the volumes. To become familiar with this shed, she draws it,
she imagines its measures, its presence in the domestic space. Through repetition, the déjà vu - the known -
and the never seen crossbreed and let the emergence and the transformation of the mental object.
Gestural as much as cosa mentale, Réjane Lhôte’s drawing is delicate, incisive, sharp. It is the musical score
of an organic architecture, an architecture thought as an extension of the body.