excerpt
In the Days' Folds
Philippe Cyroulnik
(excerpt, p. 7)
Raphaëlle Paupert-Borne paints, draws, films, and
does performances. She uses canvas and paper, as
well as the paper of our past bedrooms, scenes of life
which she grasps in short films which cast a spell over
the world's ordinariness. She paints on found photographs
which she makes large editions of. Her work is
informed by her environment, people close to her and
anonymous persons bumped into now and then, her
journeys, landscapes, and what they convey by way of
life “settings”. This does not so much involve reproducing
as extracting scenes, gestures, instants and
figures
which will give rise to pictures, and give shape
to a sense of the world, when it is incarnated in paint.
In her drawing, Raphaëlle Paupert-Borne expresses
the vivacity of eyes that meet, encounters, scenes from
life where there is a mix of intimacy and the dazzle
of the world wrenched from the throng of passers-by.
She constructs the structure in order to get to the
nub: a gaze, a body whose motion indicates a state,
the sketch of a group or the echo of what is known
as a war scene. She makes bodies, their movements
and their impromptu gestures, figures and forms. Her
drawings have a cast look, because in the urgency of
getting it down, it is important to capture the quintessence
of a present, in order to lend it something of
a human condition–but without emphasis or grandiloquence.
These are quick close-ups of fragments of
bodies, faces, and groups, as well as the links of the
décor represented by walls, buildings, cafés, squares
and underground railways which form the urban grid
in which the drawing develops. In the way they file
past, they are city “portraits”. They might almost be
the storyboard of a journey across the world, outlining
the movement but without ever reducing it to a story.
Not a report, but rather a sense of the world, a printout
of its breathing and its blanks. By using the slide
show, she amplifies them. Through the movement and
succession of images, she gives her “precipitates” of
the world a rhythm, and a poetics, and makes a song
out of them. She appropriates snapshot-like photographs of landscapes,
akin to standardized interiors. With them,
she constructs scenes where the ghosts of the characters,
animal and clown-like doubles of ourselves and
the artist, are the echo of that Fafarelle which she
used to paint recurrently and which she played in her
clown acts. They actually inhabit them and metamorphose
their banality and triviality, transforming them
through the staggered duplication of our most harmless
doings and gestures. They become the clues of a
wordless and narrative-less story, somewhere between
the marvellous and the melancholy.
(...)
