ART CITIES:Paris-Pierrette Bloch
For decades, Pierrette Bloch has streaked, dripped, and blotted ink on paper or masonite*. Occasionally she would collage maculated scraps together, or add strokes of graphite or pastel, but never in a color other than black. Or else she would turn to the unlikely material of horsehair, weaving it into diaphanous sheets or tying it into a tightly curling, impossibly long strand. The titles of her works reflect either what they’re made of (Ink on Isorel) or what they are (Horsehair Sculpture).
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Karsten Greve Archive
The solo exhibition “Un certain nombre d’œuvres 1971-2016” at Galerie Karsten Greve in Paris takes the form a retrospective on the work of Pierrette Bloch, presenting different stages of the artist’s work, starting with the collages of the ‘70s, moving on to the well-known ink-on-paper works, whose linearity echoes the famous horsehair Lines, and concluding with the drawings on mansonite*. A student of Henri Goetz and André Lhote, she developed a corpus of paintings, collages, drawings, and three-dimensional works, whose key principles are an economy of means and materials (horsehair, sailing ropes, paper, ink), the use of primary forms (dots, curls, lines), the almost exclusive use of the black and white, ideas of seriality and variation, and a writing-like aesthetic. In her work connections can be found with Minimalism, Abstraction, Support-Surface and even Oriental Art, but her work never allows itself to be categorized. The artist herself deftly avoids all attempts to qualify it, resolutely allowing it to exist on its own. From the beginning of her career Pierrette Bloch dedicated herself to exploring the possibilities of form and time in space. Her work goes beyond the tradition vocabulary of painting, limiting itself to the simplest of materials and a subordination of color. The gesture is always present, be it in repeated rhythmic brushstrokes or intricate, painstakingly woven horsehair strands. Her work is often experienced as a movement in time, following a linear play of form and emptiness, which has been compared with musical score. Bloch’s early works constitute a succession of abstract ink marks on paper that culminate in 1976 in a series of uncompromising works rendered in black ink on black paper. From 1977, her brush explores undulating lines and loops, which in 1992 liberate themselves from the sheet of paper to take the form of delicate horsehair ‘strands’. In the late ‘60s Pierrette Bloch explores the possibilities opened by the Support-Surface movement, using torn paper to produce dynamic large-scale collage compositions. Block creates her first ‘mesh’ works, woven and sewn onto felt bases, in 1973. She will later expand her work in this medium to include hemp and rope, sometimes hung from glass rods or pinned to the wall with nylon threads. Pierrette Bloch’s more recent works explore the pleasures of white, using white ink on tracing paper to play with the fluctuating hues of a non-color most commonly associated with the void. In Bloch’s works, however, the void should never be taken at face value. It always has its own weight in balancing the composition, with a presence that is almost physical. White has also taken the place of black as the color of action, engaging in role play with the past, the paper is now black while the pastel, chalk, and white ink symbols unscroll delicately across its surface like the tracks of birds. Her drawings are reduced to the purest essence while retaining all their vitality, with the works of 2015 and 2016 in white on black paper introducing a new note to her oeuvre altogether.
*Masonite is a type of hardboard made of steam-cooked and pressure-molded wood fibres, mansonit is also known as Isorel.
Info: Galerie Karsten Greve, 5 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration 14/1-25/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.galerie-karsten-greve.com
