Casabo or the murmur of colour
After her recent exhibition on the picture rails of the Community Arts Centre of Dieppe, Marie-Claude Casabo is exhibiting a new series of works of art at the Henri IV Arts Centre at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux. An opportunity for us to get to know the artist better.
Marie-Claude Casabo entered the world of art as an autodidact without having studied at the college of Fine Arts and she pursues her work in the calm of her studio in Darnétal. Her work place looks out onto a maze of foliage of which the fragile organization changes according to the seasons. This unceasing but imperceptible movement is probably the secret of her creation. Deeply fixed in a contemporary style, M.C. Casabo has a preference for soft, slightly muffled colours and rapid and fleeting touches. You will never find in her works very bright or basic colours that have just spurted out of the tube. She prefers the gradual perception of greys. Her works have generic titles – gardens; dialogue murmur – and she paints on canvas, Canson paper or on thin paper and often uses collage and mixed techniques. In fact, she uses a process which by its effects is like onion peel and could easily remind you of the way the memory works when images of the past suddenly spring to mind.
Conscious of the very unstable and transient nature of life, M.C. Casabo has made of art, a sort of yoga, which helps her to immerse herself in a meditative weightless state. At the same time her work maintains its fluidity and vigour of life. By referring to a motif in one of her recent works, you could even talk about paper doors, an expression which takes us over to the Far-East. “To paint” said Bissière, “is to be less lonely in this miserable world. It’s a call to other human beings. To feel less cold.” He also dared to say : “I don’t believe in education or in experience. But only in the most primitive of instincts. The one that is age-old.” What have we done with that instinct in our high pedagogical spheres? When speaking of her own painting, M.C. Casabo insists on the fact that nature plays a very important role in her art, an attitude that goes hand in hand with a certain “poetic ear” open to the world, which explains the title of her exhibition dialogue murmur – which, at first sight, evokes music rather than fine art. But we know to what extent these fields are linked together for whoever sees the deep logic of the universe.
Luis PORQUET, art critic
Les Affiches de Normandie, August 18th, 2004
Translation by Sally PLOTEAU
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