PATRICIA BAFFIN: From image to icon
Born 1963 in Martinique
Live and works in Martinique
Ever since her first work at Martinique's Regional Institute of Visual Art, Patricia Baffin has loved to delve into the memory of things as well as her own. How time leaves its mark on objects, wearing them down, dulling them and how can one bring them back to life? Furthermore, whence comes this nagging need to turn them into images?
First there is the pleasure of wandering down memory lane, but also the creative fervour, and other motives which we are left to divine.
It all starts with something given or glimpsed which she makes her own: daily objects from a bygone age, a sort of parti pris des choses, in the poet Francis Ponge's phrase. The objects are not merely seen and memorised, but have also been manipulated: the bowl, the wrought iron grill, the coffee mill, the trunk, the Venetian blind. They evoke a bygone life, the daily doings of the people from the backwoods, a bit like Vincent van Gogh's shoes…
At the same time as creating a movement of appropriation, of veneration almost, we see a need to transform, perhaps even to destroy. It seems that only through this double movement, with its apparent contradictions, is something new capable of emerging.
The fifteen works on show at the Fondation Clement take us from the nostalgic image of these emblematic objects into the dimension of icons of memory.
The novelty is first of all the colour, acrylic on glass, on glass plate, commonly known as fixed under glass. By leaving the confines of the box and volume to return to a flat surface, Patricia Baffin gains another freedom along the way: that of the pictorial act seen transparently, at the very level of its execution and not as a reflection or a mirror.
Painting on glass allows precisely this transfiguration of the image – sign into an icon. This generally forms part of the order of divine things, bearers of the sacramental aura of what has been seen, then has become invisible.
By extending her initial approach, Patricia Baffin shows us that our gaze can also fix on the strangeness of things, their intrinsic mystery. There then appears a sort of inversion of roles between the objects and herself, between them and us. It is the things looking at us and not us looking at the things. They exchange their status as tools of ordinary life to emerge as a vision, a poetic otherness, still sustained by a memory which is gradually forgetting the objects and retaining just the trace they leave.
Michèle Baj Strobel
Aica Caraïbe du sud
February 2008
Extracts from the article
written for ARTHEME n° 20
on the occasion of
THE EXHIBITION AT THE FONDATION CLEMENT
Du 18 Janvier au 15 Fevrier 2008
Contact: aica-sc@orange.fr
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