Coulées
Déborah Sportès’ trickles of paint
September 2018, a visit to Déborah Sportès’ studio.
The studio, coiled in upper-floor Paris, is spacious. Beyond the intimate corner with its shelves of books and photographs, the rest of the space is peopled with paint pots, blank canvases and rolls of silicone. Déborah Sportès has decided to take a break from her painting in which her free, nervous lines of acrylic paint mingled with writing.
She has chosen now to confront the elements: the dialogue between the matter and materials with which she is experimenting. The base medium is silicone, the second skin that preserves the colour’s materiality and thickness without absorbing it. Onto this skin she throws acrylic colours, choosing their harmonies and allowing them to trickle. The colours flow freely until she intervenes again to stop the writing forming and allows it to dry. The result is striking, always different and unique. Another version, another dimension, another experience: the medium is now cotton canvas. The freedom this dimension affords enables different dialogues and other, more vivid colours, from which the thickness and power of the acrylic varnish emerges in all its harshness. The canvas is part of the work. The frame provides a screen and depth and is the work’s showcase.
Mediums and materials: this is the question that Déborah Sportès is posing herself and us in this new series. Allowing mediums to live, allowing different substances and materials to unite and coalesce, this is her path towards the conclusion of an experimentation questioning both herself and us. The projections of colours, their harmony, due both to chance and the necessity to mix with one another, culminates in a work that has a cathartic effect on the viewer. These drips and trickles give colour the leading role. The constantly changing experience of seeing how the reds express something different to the greens, blacks and blues opens us to other sensations. The thicknesses of the acrylic trickles and flows awaken the sensual pleasures of touch and relaxation.
Then there is the bottom of the work, the mystery and questions posed by these thick drips, like torn writing to which we can add our own reflections and phrases.
Beyond aesthetics, Déborah Sportès has created a new universe of pagelandscapes whose biology embraces a host of universes and enables us to deconstruct ours by adding our words and phrases to this extraordinary writing.
Jacqueline Frydman
28 September 2018
