From her studio in Berlin-Neukölln, Alizée Gazeau introduced us to her work on materiality. Based in Berlin for the past four years, the artist’s practice is mainly pictorial, but also includes installations. She is interested in intermediate surfaces that, like a fishing net or a glass float, lie between elements such as air and water. Other objects, such as a leather riding saddle or wooden tiles, stand between bodies and species, but also between bodies and spaces, and give food for thought about the contact surfaces that surround us and their permeability. For Alizée Gazeau, these objects are powerful points of interconnection, holding back or separating materials but also connecting entities. They give rise to rubbing and friction that, when fixed by paint on larges canvas or activated in installations, result in new symbiotic, organic and even dreamlike forms.
Alizée Gazeau’s pictorial work is at the same time restricted to a two-tone palette, while multiplying the effects of nuance and transparency on large imposing formats. She told us about her interest in the sea, which led her from the French Atlantic coast to the Venetian Lagoon, for water’s ability to penetrate substances and offer infinite interplays of tones and light. While her latest black-and-white pieces take up these forms of aqueous fluidity, they are also reminiscent of the photogram image. This photographic technique consists in placing objects on photosensitive paper to capture their direct form, giving both a formal or abstract rendering and, at the same time, a direct transcription of the objects used, i.e. an imprint of reality. This duality is reflected in the paintings of Alizée Gazeau, whose serial work cultivates and masters trouble from canvas to canvas.