Take 1
First execution date: Winter 1998
Former title: “Eminence”
Second execution date: Spring 2003
Acrylic; Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Aquarelle crayons (7500.051, 7500.060, 7500.005, 7500.049); Pébéo acrylic matte medium; on cotton canvas mounted on MDF (medium-density fibreboard) panels; spruce; steel; polyurethane glue
Installation venue: Galerie ZOO, Strasbourg, France
Installation date: Spring 2003
Overall dimensions: 1 × (125 × 125 × 3.9 cm), 1 × (126 × 126 × 4.5 cm)
Fragment dimensions: 1 × (125 × 69.5 × 3.9 cm + 99.5 × 49 × 3.9 cm + 55.5 × 25.5 × 3.9 cm), 1 × (126 × 70 × 4.5 cm + 100 × 49.5 × 4.5 cm + 56 × 26 × 4.5 cm)
Wall dimensions: 364 × 288 cm
MDF panel fabrication: Hackspill Carpentry & Cabinetmaking, Entzheim, France
Photography: Christian Creutz, Strasbourg, France
Repotting & Moult was born of a mistake, and has already lived once before under another name. In its earlier life, three stretched rectangles — three separate bodies — were joined to re-form a square. Timber cut at the bench, battens joined, canvas pulled tight like a straitjacket: with each step, a minute deviation, then another. Edge to edge, the faults began to count. Lines veiled, angles bowed, and at the centre a slit remained — two non-parallel edges, slightly askew, a vertical breath undoing the square’s authority.
Here, the square ceases to be an axiom and returns to being a body. Measure’s emblem wavers; the authority of the line proves conditional. The first impulse was to mend. Yet mending would have erased the very phenomenon: not the chase after abstract perfection, but the acknowledgement of passage — the moment when form owns its history.
Then comes its metamorphosis — its second life. It moults, changes skin — or rather, skeleton. Not to shed what was too tight, but what prevented it from being: a reconstituted square sustained by compromise. Too bound to an ill-suited regime, it goes into exile: repotting. The canvas leaves its stretchers to migrate onto another soil — three cut MDF panels, quietly stable. Not a monolith, but a triptych frame: the origin persists in the partition of the support. And to cover fully, the format tightens: from 126 cm to 125 cm a side — a discreet adjustment, a decisive choice.
An inverted moult: the skin does not abandon the frame; the frame changes to save the skin.
Hide glue acts as an archive. Fused into the fabric, it preserves the shape of the first embrace: creases, strains, scars. To fit the new support, resistance had to be met with counter-force; that effort remains visible, a palimpsest of strength and fragility. The refounded square erases nothing: it bears. It exposes the enigma of a geometry that accepts its biography.
Repotting & Moult holds together two orders of truth:
the ideal of the line and the body of matter. Between them, the form breathes — faithful to what it was, exact in what it becomes. This is not correction; it is a change of humus. The plant remains, but at last the soil that receives it is right.
K.L.
Extract 1
First execution date: Winter 1998
Former title: “Eminence”
Second execution date: Spring 2003
Acrylic; Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Aquarelle crayons (7500.051, 7500.060, 7500.005, 7500.049); Pébéo acrylic matte medium; on cotton canvas mounted on MDF (medium-density fibreboard)
Overall dimensions: 125 × 125 × 3.9 cm
Fragment dimensions: (125 × 69.5 × 3.9 cm) + (99.5 × 49 × 3.9 cm) + (55.5 × 25.5 × 3.9 cm)
MDF fabrication: Hackspill Carpentry & Cabinetmaking, Entzheim, France
Photography: Christian Creutz, Strasbourg, France
Extract 2
First execution date: Winter 1998
Former title: “Eminence”
Second execution date: Spring 2003
Acrylic; Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Aquarelle crayons (7500.051, 7500.060, 7500.005, 7500.049); Pébéo acrylic matte medium; on cotton canvas mounted on MDF (medium-density fibreboard)
Overall dimensions: 125 × 125 × 3.9 cm
Fragment dimensions: (125 × 69.5 × 3.9 cm) + (99.5 × 49 × 3.9 cm) + (55.5 × 25.5 × 3.9 cm)
MDF fabrication: Hackspill Carpentry & Cabinetmaking, Entzheim, France
Photography: Christian Creutz, Strasbourg, France
Extract 3
First execution date: Winter 1998
Former title: “Eminence”
Second execution date: Spring 2003
Acrylic; Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Aquarelle crayons (7500.051, 7500.060, 7500.005, 7500.049); Pébéo acrylic matte medium; on cotton canvas mounted on MDF (medium-density fibreboard)
Overall dimensions: 125 × 125 × 3.9 cm
Fragment dimensions: (125 × 69.5 × 3.9 cm) + (99.5 × 49 × 3.9 cm) + (55.5 × 25.5 × 3.9 cm)
MDF fabrication: Hackspill Carpentry & Cabinetmaking, Entzheim, France
Photography: Christian Creutz, Strasbourg, France