Suspens de Nantes, 2012 - Cécile Bart

The central stair cavity of the former Decré department store bears a resemblance to the inside of a camera pointed at the sky, with the constant rolling of its escalators and the overhanging circular eye high above, through which light enters. Cécile Bart takes advantage of this mechanical movement by using these automatic staircases to create a captivating cinematic experience. Seven hanging translucent “painting-screens” play with oblique angles, superimpositions, perspectives, and colours. The variation of positions gives the spectator the feeling that objects have been stopped mid-flight, or mid-fall. The surfaces, frozen in their levitation, are like stained glass thrown out into space where everything becomes a pattern. Cécile Bart conjugates surface, colour, light and space with great precision and liberates the canvas from the traditional frontality of painting. The stretched Tergal canvases are painted, while taking pains to remove any surplus paint in order to preserve the quality of translucency in this new pictorial medium.