Isabelle Pelissier: Folio Notebooks
Isabelle Pelissier is a sculptor, painter and
metalwork artist currently living in Buffalo, New York. She
attended art school in Paris, France, and began using metal
in New Mexico. She has had solo exhibitions in Paris (1995),
Santa Fe (1999), and Buffalo (2000, 2004). She has participated
in group exhibitions at Hallwalls in Buffalo, and in Santa Fe,
New Mexico.
In an alcove of her most recent solo exhibition
(Buffalo Arts Studio, 2004), seven individual notebooks (bound
in a rough, black vinyl) were chained to a central metal block,
providing a clear indication of their connection to her sculptural
pieces, literally affixed in a position of subservience to the
more imposing steel forms and designs that filled the largest
spaces of the gallery. The notebooks are, in her mind, a kind
of background and foundational surface from which to realize
her plastic and serial projects. In them one can witness the
tumult of creation-the speed of execution, the fulfillment of
near-monochromatic studies, and also a private mythology of
figures, faces, couches, and landscapes. Yet there is none of
that myriad repetition as can be found in many of her permanent
installations. The combination of major elements in the design
are abrupt but never simplistic; in them one may choose to see
gestures not unlike Jess’s, or a kind of Twombly-twigginess
scattered under the wheels of Schwitters’s ox-cart. Not least
important in these pages are the bits and scraps of language,
which sometimes offset or clarify the images on the page. Certain
themes begin to emerge during a careful survey of the collaged,
painted, and drawn pages: the weather, oversized oil drums,
dull greens and oily blues clashing with menacing orange, pink,
red and white slabs. A story about a giraffe and a street-worker
seems to emerge, or a stevedore hauling-up an oil drum single-handedly
to impress women whose lips, eyebrows or hips stretch to outweigh
all their other features. Yet just as often there are landscapes
traversed by giant high-heeled divas, bulbous or filamented
trees, aqueducts, or else the earth is inhabited by ornate chairs,
disfigured faces, and hundreds of seemingly misplaced products
from the aisles of discount stores, becoming spiny Southwestern
plant-forms or simply a dry, living matter.
As her background work, and in their beautiful
speed, the pages deceptively portray a sense of impatience and
frustration; and yet, when given the distance and stillness
they require, the images become iconic and incomparable. They
reveal their singularity-but can also lend feelings of intrusion,
images of distaste, or even claustrophobia. What is far more
important is the characteristic surprise which these notebooks
transmit-the images won’t settle into complacency; color and
form are never arranged to console, comfort or offer compensation.
There is a fierce and delicate energy here which is not easily
captured in small, digital versions or if skimmed in quick succession.
It is the energy of a realization composed by contingency and
humor, by a great desire for renewed forms and altered spaces
which parse the syntax of a new dreaming and habitation. The
expression of speed is not to dismiss care, because, in their
uniqueness, these images are built from a subtlety in which
the unresolved spectator finds order on the cusp of unveiling
itself. There is a celerity that comprehends all the minute
changes of every prosthetic gauge linking us, lying to us about
our metabolic substrates. It is substrate-formation, via color
and torque, and a sharp text-lesson comprised of the perceptual
analogues to her psychological experience of internal concepts.
Concepts of a social, political, fantasy notation that is also
our own static hallucination, our commercial helplessness.
Douglas Manson
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