Pierrette Bloch’s ink drawings plunge us into a lyrical and sensorial abstraction that is conveyed through a spare style that uses just a few elements. The spots and traces of black ink that form the essence of her graphic repertory develop on the immaculate paper in a repetitive pattern generated by a steady fluid gesture, while an expressive physical brushstroke endlessly renews the artist’s compositions.
Whether almost diaphanous or more sustained, these marks seem to float on the support and compose an infinite reworking of indecipherable signs that execute a mysterious choreography. Playing on nearly imperceptible variations of tonality and rhythm, the artist subtly questions our relationship to space, time and movement. Far from being controlled or automatic, the minimalist gesture follows a respiration that imposes its own tempo while shaping the slight, almost musical warp and woof of a slow drifting.
Humble, silent, Bloch’s approach is akin to an art practice that verges on writing, although it is a writing that involves no narrative procedure, no chronological or argumentative progression. Profoundly novel, her work consciously steers away from our visual habits and holds at arm’s length any and all system of references and aesthetic categories, lending form to a prose that displays enormous freedom.
Bloch’s oeuvre is the result of a slow, linear development, and possesses the inventiveness and aptness of an instinctive language in perpetual transformation: “Begun long ago, my work is part of a continuity that has been punctuated by ups and downs, and yet is inextinguishable; time and memory play out there with the obviousness and certainty of their linearity. My first show dates from 1951, and it seems to me that I am writing a story that has no end.” P. B.
Whether almost diaphanous or more sustained, these marks seem to float on the support and compose an infinite reworking of indecipherable signs that execute a mysterious choreography. Playing on nearly imperceptible variations of tonality and rhythm, the artist subtly questions our relationship to space, time and movement. Far from being controlled or automatic, the minimalist gesture follows a respiration that imposes its own tempo while shaping the slight, almost musical warp and woof of a slow drifting.
Humble, silent, Bloch’s approach is akin to an art practice that verges on writing, although it is a writing that involves no narrative procedure, no chronological or argumentative progression. Profoundly novel, her work consciously steers away from our visual habits and holds at arm’s length any and all system of references and aesthetic categories, lending form to a prose that displays enormous freedom.
Bloch’s oeuvre is the result of a slow, linear development, and possesses the inventiveness and aptness of an instinctive language in perpetual transformation: “Begun long ago, my work is part of a continuity that has been punctuated by ups and downs, and yet is inextinguishable; time and memory play out there with the obviousness and certainty of their linearity. My first show dates from 1951, and it seems to me that I am writing a story that has no end.” P. B.
