PAINT AND SCULPT TO REVEAL
In Isabelle de La Touche’s eyes, painting is a mean of exploration. The plasticity of her modelling as well as the slow declination of her “invisible” white surfaces contribute to the recreation of a three-dimensional space slowly leading her into the world of sculpture and installations.
Her debut into painting took the form of an artistic and technical apprenticeship in the studio of Armando Morales, intervening in the first coat of his canvases as well as practicing still life painting. Later she abandons color for a slow work of revelation. There her protocol leads her to alternate thicker opaque layers with subtle transparencies until reaching timelessness. Her slow declination of white hues, shapes and lights evoke an infinite utopia, a meditation on time and space, a vanity.
For the last few years, the artist mingles her own story with History, creating compassionate links to others. This is how she transformed a small piece of driftwood rescued from the waters of Lake Geneva into an anthropomorphic sculpture: Hope.
With this fragile yet victorious piece she offers to repair time and life leading us into a unique relationship to nature, landscape and ephemeral beauty.
A snowy landscape engulfing the world in a transitory state, a simple dry leaf softly dancing in a cobweb: everything is a pretext to reveal the invisible.
Isabelle de La Touche holds herself in this precarious balance of her own poetic vision of the world, disappearing at times, affirming herself at others, questioning our own relationship with Nature, a path imbued with ecospirituality.
Frederic Elkaim
BIOGRAPHY
1962 born in Paris
1984-1987 Art History Bachelor
1984 training program with French Historical Monuments on conservation
1984-1986 apprenticeship with Armando Morales, Nicaraguan artist former teacher at la Cooper Hewit NY: prepares his canvases, enlarges his sketches transposing them with lean paints
1985-1998 Atelier de Recherche Picturale : Learns about painting techniques from Fayum to acrylics.
Copies Rembrandt, Vermeer…
1991 introduction to sculpture. Curator to a collection of old master’s drawings and paintings
1995-1996 restructures a garden to welcome a sculpture
1999 Interior decoration: using rough materials as concrete, wood, plywood. Studies and designs furniture: staircases, tables, benches, chest of draws…
2003 travels to China to learn about ink
2008 travels to Tibet
2014 discovers Japan: fascination for gardens, minimalism and refinement
2017 starts working on Hope
2020 first exhibition as curator and artist
2021 moves to Romainmôtier
2022 creates L’ESPACE ALMA M(ôtiers) ou l’âme du Cloître
THOUGHTS
Lumière, matière and pigment
Patrice de Pracontal , Editions Gourcuff - Gradenigo, Paris 2008.
This book is an essential tool to all who are interested in painting.
However beyond precious technical insights, Patrice de Pracontal is a painter himself and a sensitive teacher. He urged me to be present to the object of painting, to organize my sensations in order to try to translate what touches me: an invitation to SEE
Yahne Le Toumelin on my recent work : "A noble painting imbued with silent and profound peace where love rests."
Armando Morales
The strongest memory from my two years working with Armando Morales besides his rigorous organisation and relentless work, was his permanent quest for sensuality in everything he saw:
"The eye does not only see but touches, becomes a finger that checks, that senses. A table, a bottle, an orange have the torpor of what doesn’t move, they are having a nap."
Cézanne and Giacometti write...
"Art is the revelation of an exquisite sensitivity."
"Art is a religion. It aims to the elevation of the mind."
"Looking at nature in order to capture the character of the model.
Painting is not copying slavishly the object: its aim is to seize its harmony between numerous relations, to translate it into one's own words through a new and original logic."
Alberto Giacometti
"It is only while working that I know what I see."
