Art'n Box - Art director
Art critic
Gallery Manager - ETC
Nature is a talisman
(March 2020)
Virginie Hucher is a French artist graduated in plastic arts. After training in various significant workshops (Michel Gouéry, Bruno Lebel, Marc Alberghina), she developed a mostly abstract aesthetic in its own forms. Fine colorist, her work focuses on themes related to nature, the body and the living through several mediums: acrylic, oil, performance, sculpture.
Matisse often recalled his need to express in his paintings "the feeling, so to speak, religious that [he] has life" (1). Admirer of the painter, Virginie Hucher does not hide the organic origin of her works, however very abstract. The colored masses are centered on the canvas, duly delimited in strange shapes which escape classical geometry. These elements, often alone in space, obey a vacuum-filling relationship dear to Taoism. The backgrounds are as neutral as the figures are full and no superfluous details disturb their unity. In harmonious and shimmering colors, it is nature that inspires. Virginie Hucher does not hesitate to define her artistic approach under the auspices of a commitment in favor of the protection of the environment, fauna, flora and life on Earth. These organic, vegetable, or mineral hybridizations form a means for the artist to limit himself to the essential. “Raw bodies” to use Lucrèce's periphrasis in De rerum natura, they play on the absence of scale to approach a work of microcosm in the macrocosm. Do we see the last or first organisms on our planet?
The formal appearance of these pseudo-monads is thus not incompatible with the vital impulse preceding them. "Nature is written in mathematical language," recalls the aphorism of Galileo. A few centuries ago, tradition wanted Plato's Academy to be engraved with this injunction: "Let no one enter here unless he is a surveyor". Geometry, for the author, corresponds to the thinker's capacity for abstraction, his ability to go beyond the stage of sensations to rise to the pure intelligible (the spirit world). Hence, a question arises: are these forms really abstractions? Far from the border between abstraction and figuration, all in all relative and constructed by history, we can see that reality is there, inscribed in abstract figures. The titles, too, call to order reality. Form, if it comes from nature, emancipates itself from it, abstracts from it, precisely. "Abstraction" is what is "taken from". We will therefore not be surprised to find a representational system in the color ranges used: green / nature, ocher / earth, blue / sky etc. These nuances can thus echo the synesthetic systems between the forms, colors and emotions developed by artists of the historical avant-garde. Kandinsky, in Du Spirituel dans l'Art, defined color as an interior necessity, the result of the harmony between natural elements and the movements of the soul. Virginie Hucher's hues, generally limited to two, show the artist's colorist's awareness of color as a harmony of two tones, whose beauty is revealed as a dialectical principle. From the technique, too, comes the particular patina. Virginie Hucher draws the properties of her mediums as well as her inspirations: acrylic or oil, sparingly diluted, sometimes used together. Very material, the brushstrokes do not indulge in the flat: inside the form, the possibilities of vibration are vast. Ceramics offer a third dimension to their slide show of forms. In modeling as in painting, the artist does not hesitate to show the "invoice", the process of the work being done, reinforcing a certain autonomy of the figure. The theorist Adorno underlined the spiritual dimension at work in this form of creation: "The totally organized works, pejoratively called formalists, are the most realistic insofar as they are realized in themselves and that only their content of truth allows this realization, realizes their spiritual character, instead of simply signifying it ”(2). The autonomy of the work is all the more important as the artist conceives of solitude as a principle of creation, upstream of an awareness of the world and of spiritual work. The journey is long to arrive at these simple forms. If the artist often substitutes objects found in nature, DIY tools or even his hand and forearm with a brush, the effect is felt as much in the material as in the ritual of creation. Coming from a family of choreographers, herself a dancer, Virginie Hucher draws with the body on sand, snow, or water in sorts of performances where the "living supports" are there to exalt form. In a similar way, it is by moving and not sitting at his easel that the artist paints, in a magic gesture that gives the colored masses a talismanic dimension. The one who likes to travel in the Far North, may not have been hermetic to the influence of the Amerindian shamanism which considers that power comes from the interior of everything, however small it may be. Ecological amulets or attractive geometries? In her artistic approach, Virginie Hucher likes to recall the notion of mystery that makes the present moment the first creative principle.
1. Henri Matisse, Writings and remarks on art, ed. Dominique Fourcade, Paris, Hermann, 1972, p.49.
2.Theodor W. Adorno, Towards the content of truth of works of art in Aesthetic theory, trad. Marc Jimenez, Paris, 1974, p.174.