HubHug 40mcube
150, rue de Rennes
35340 Liffré

This residency is part of Contre vents et marées, with the support of the Brittany Régional Council and the collaboration of a.c.b – contemporary art in Brittany.

La scène du vent is an ongoing research that attempts to bring together several gestures, materials and colored mediums in its different states. Quackgrass, daisies, gorse, earth picked and collected around the HubHug, charred wood from a leftover campfire, colored chalk made during the residency constitute the set of colored mediums used. I rub, cover, wipe, blur, dilute, attenuate until I reach the dust of things, the infinitesimal state of matter. All the residues are collected on wooden boards and form a new colored poem. Some paintings are covered with tissue paper. The assembly of papers like a patchwork directly echoes the construction of the HubHug walls made of assembled wood panels. The lightness of the paper plays with the air currents of the space and the movement of the spectators. 

My pictorial work is imbued with the direct environment from which I work. The variations of the light intensity, the different atmospheres, the density of the air are sources of inspiration that I try to translate by the color, the gestures and the supports of the painting. To paint at the same rhythm as a liquid infused in a paper, that a landscape penetrates in us. A part of my research is expressed in murals in situ, another part of my work consists of research on paper.”

Through the experience of color, light or touch, Margaux Janisset’s work explores the practice of painting in different forms. The artist plays with space and the temporality of the gaze, proposing a sensitive experience of painting. Sometimes on paper or notebooks, she extends her work into in situ interventions and inserts itself into the architecture. In the words of the artist, she thus develops a site-responsive rather than site-specific practice. The works are not separated from their process of realization and the conditions of their presentation.

The architectural context is the starting point of Margaux Janisset’s work. It determines an ambiance, an atmosphere, a climate. She intervenes in exhibition spaces, but also in interstitial spaces (a corridor, a window). The architectural elements are the supports, the points of support of gestures and colors. Her interventions make body to the architecture, and she tries to reveal, to unveil, the lights, the shadows and the traces, the textures, the imperfections of the walls. By relying on what is already present, she acts with the space, accompanies its movement, and seems to collaborate with it.

By discreet and light gestures, at the limit of the perceptible, appears an uncertainty between what is already there and the interventions of the artist. Guided by sensations, she induces a floating specific to each place, a tone. Her interventions are clues, scattered tracks that react with the space to leave room for intervals and give importance to the void that participates in the rhythm of the whole. The time stretches and allows to reveal the nuances, the colors appear and disappear in a perpetual movement of coloration and discoloration.

Margaux Janisset proposes an experience of space, light and time and focuses on their permanent changes. She invites the viewer to adopt a floating, airy look. The discretion of certain paintings participates in a space in movement where each change becomes an event. It is no longer a matter of looking at the work from a distance, but of inhabiting it, of living a moment in its presence.