Saint-Étienne (Loire). This first retrospective dedicated to Pierrette Bloch (1928-2017) comes eight years after her death. While the physicist David Quéré, his entitled, co-commissioner of the exhibition, inventoria and sorts his workshop fund. This unprecedented fund, explains Aurélie Voltz, director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMC+) of Saint-Etienne and also commissioner, constitutes a third of the works presented, the others coming from almost equal shares of institutional loans and large private European collections. But if it was not until, it is also, relates David Quéré who was close to the artist, “From the fact that she herself, little turned towards her past, not very complacent with her own work and always in research, chose rather to show her recent work”. Some significant exhibitions, however, took place during his lifetime, at the Graphic Art Cabinet of the Center Pompidou (2002) and at the Jenisch Museum in Vevey, Switzerland (2013).
The chronological scenography manages to restore the creative path of the artist, his persistence in an economy of assumed means, and his experiments. It also gives this work the sensitivity and joy that are part of it, when its principles, the choice of black and white, serial rehearsal, the simplicity of recurring motifs – points, knots … – could appear austere. The visitor here will meet an irreducible work to the image reproduced for its diffusion which devitates it.
Analogies with the natural world
Since “premises”, at the opening, where the influence of Soulages is guessing, in which Pierrette Bloch maintained a long -term friendship, up to the first spots on supports that are still marouflaged, we see her favored her way, away from painting. It will therefore be the ink on paper, released from the chassis, the frame, the table. The hanging accompanies this emancipation to the central room. The works show points, some like imprints that animals would leave in the snow, others finer, constelle the immaculate surface. Analogies with natural phenomena, rain, gust, come to mind, but the imperfection of accidents, overlapping, drips, pâtés … highlights the gesture, human originally.
The pace of the exhibition is fast. Almost too much, we could say, since we quickly go to the first tests with knitted hemp meshes, crin thread stung on cardboard and combed like a mane, or knotted in large loops along nylon threads, like writing lines, which also quickly appear more obvious with graphics on mail paper. On the wall facing them are placed very large inks, dating from the late 1990s, where the alignments of tiny points form by waving landscapes. For a better apprehension of his approach, the room text specifies that the artist replaces the pen brush here. But did Pierrette Bloch know the “eigenschriften” (“Self-writings” or “Scriptures for oneself”) that Irma Blank began to achieve at the turn of the 1970s? We will not learn it.
Pierrette Bloch, Paper ink1980, Private collection, Paris.
© Gregory Copitet
After an evocation of these long narrow bands of inked paper, the route embraces the last decade, where the polyester diaphanous layers appear and the white -flushing white inks. Her last work, an aquatint, representing a tenuous succession of irregular points, on the edge of the desk which she could barely reach, moved by her contingent delicacy.
On the occasion of this exhibition, MAMC + acquired the Ceysson & Bénétière of a beautiful set of pastel drawings (2015). By its complete iconography and its contributions to the literary style, the catalog is a success.
