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Artist: Charlotte Moth

For the past six years, Charlotte Moth has accompanied the adventures of Marcelle Alix and vice versa. Six years since her initial exhibition at the gallery and since our first FIAC, when we had devoted our booth to a solo presentation of her work. Charlotte’s practice is kin to the "line" we were impelled to define by some when we opened the gallery: sometimes impalpable, always sensual, proceeding as much from the spirit as from the body. If the economics of a traveling artist explains in part the importance of photography in Moth’s early working years, her concern with sculpture has been clearly defined as time went by, using the exhibition framework as a vast set within which all meetings or conversations are possible.

Charlotte's favorite material is space. The images in her Travelogue, a collection of photographs shot for the past 15 years, amount to studies that feed her sculpture practice. Shots of buildings that sometimes look like UFOs placed in the landscape, reveal for instance how she considers the liminal space between sculpture, monument, and architecture. The two new slideshows featured in the gallery’s projection room, respectively documenting the church of St. Bernadette de Banlay (in Nevers, France, 1966, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio architects) and the Apollo Pavilion (in Peterlee, UK, also 1966, designed by Victor Pasmore) bear witness of the Travelogue’s indisputable longevity; of the vitality of this collection and its necessity.

We also understand today, through objects presented at the gallery (living images, 2015 and Lurking Sculpture (Rotating Rubber Plant), 2016), how a knowledge of Modernist architecture and art has nurtured her vision of volumes in space. Mastering those references nevertheless gives no "solution" to the beautiful mystery these pieces contain, nor keys to the magic of a successful work of art. It can never be summarized by a short explanation. "Tell me" the (exhibition’s) story, rushing visitors often ask, as they wish to be pointed the shortest path to the heart of the artist's work. One could obviously be tempted to evoke the design of exhibition space according to Daniel Buren or Andre Cadere, how light plays such a significant role in Eileen Gray’s architectural projects, how Constantin Brancusi and Barbara Hepworth have reflected on the pedestal and photography. But how can the aerial sensation, the obvious suspension or even a deep reverie in which Charlotte’s work immerses us be explained or described when it is in fact accessed simultaneously by vision, senses and thought? I find it difficult to express with words the jubilation that the latest versions of her shimmering curtain has caused in me (Behind every surface there is a mystery: a hand that might emerge, an image that might be kindled, or a structure that might reveal its image (version 10), 2016). The same goes for her Light Structure (2008-2016). These are two pieces to which the artist keeps returning: the former was shown in the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein last summer while the latter is currently on display at the Parc Saint-Léger Contemporary Art Center. There is something quite moving to see them reapparing, similar and still different in each new context, as the years go by.

In Moth’s practice, thoughts that were inherited from conceptualism and in-situ works feed a joyful, poetic and atmospheric form, away from the rigidity of their initial, historical appearance. If space is Charlotte’s material, she manages to anchor her work with serenity in a white cube which is quite heavily charged with art’s experiments. Nevertheless, there is such lightness in her practice that her pieces sometime seem irresistibly attracted to the ceiling—such as Light Structure, a large wood frame on which projectors equipped with color filters are arranged—allowing for the walls and floor to exist on their own account so that they’re not just a framework but inherent parts of the work itself. Not unlike the way plants are gently placed next to sculptures in Hepworth’s studio photographs, Moth’s works stick to walls and take on their state of interior objects; their domestic kinship.
We are happy to have accompanied Charlotte on her path as a collector of knowledge and forms. The incessant experiments she produces from reworked motifs have now amounted to a unique process which sports simple sophistication as well as unlimited contours. Her recent institutional shows have revealed with full force the sensual potential that we had perceived in snippets through these years of working together and we’re joyfully ready to discover the work that will appear over the next six years… And beyond.
IA

Charlotte Moth was born in 1978 in Carshalton, United Kingdom. She's been living in Paris since 2007. The Serralves Foundation in Porto (2011), Centre d'Art contemporain de Genève (2012) or Esker Foundation (2015) all organised solo exhibitions of her work. She recently participated to the collective exhibitions: Rideaux/ Blinds at IAC in Villeurbanne (cur. Marie de Brugerolle), Modest Muses at Tatra Museum (cur. Kasia Redzsiz), The Promise at Arnolfini, Bristol (cur. Axel John Wieder) and Function Follows Vision, Vision Follows Reality at Kunsthalle Wien (cur. Luca Lo Pinto and Vanessa Joan Müller). Tate Britain commissioned and exhibited her series of works Choreography of the Image in its Archive Room in 2015-2016 (cur. Penelope Curtis, Inga Fraser). Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein has hosted an important solo exhibition of her work in the summer (cur. Christiane Meyer-Stoll), which is accompanied by a monographic publication: Travelogue (ed. Snoeck). The exhibition will tour to the MIT List Visual Center (USA) in 2017.

lightly in the world is organised in connection with the exhibition Charlotte Moth: Pensée kaléidoscopique at Parc Saint Léger-Centre d'art de Pougues-les-Eaux (FR) that runs until Dec. 11.

The monographic publication Travelogue will be presented at Fondation d'entreprise Ricard in Paris, on Friday, December 2nd.

Special thanks: Camila Renz, Baptiste Pinteaux, François Orphelin, Catherine Pavlovic, Franck Balland, Léa Merit, Juliette Tixier and the team of Parc Saint Léger, Christiane Meyer-Stoll, Fabian Flückiger and the team of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Axel Jablonski, Gabriel Jablonski, Gila Strobel, Joseph Tang, Caroline Hancock, Peter Fillingham, Toan Vu-Huu, Andre Baldinger, Peta Rake, Shauna Thompson, Rebecca Loewen, Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, Kasia Redzsiz, Ian Hunt, Fabrice Hergott, Eva Birkenstock, Penelope Curtis, Luke James, Sitterwerk St Gallen, Adam Kosciuszko and Qwark Solutions, Alice Joubert, Colette Barbier, Antonia Scintilla et la Fondation d'entreprise Ricard.

> The gallery will be exceptionally open on Sunday, Novemver 27, from noon to 6pm at the occasion of the event "Un dimanche à la galerie"