Anne Blanchet, Sculptor of Light

Beaux-Arts. The artist is showing her “drawings” in plexiglas at the Alice Pauli Gallery, in Lausanne. Works which trap both light and the onlooker's eye.

Philippe Mathonnet.

Drawing a line gives rise to two planes. Pulling this line into a mass creates volumes but also produces sensations. This is how the Geneva-based artist Anne Blanchet reformulates the bases of geometry and at the same time displays the complicitous ways of light and shade. Her works are imbued with both a diaphanous sobriety and a voluptuous magic.

From afar, visitors to the Alice Pauli Gallery in Lausanne, where Anne Blanchet's Light Drawings are on view, imagine they are seeing fine netting stretched over frames. Close up, it becomes clear that the material is in fact a 3-centimetre thick sheet of opaque plexiglas, in which the eye captures the brief, dark flash of a cut. A line, one tenth of a millimetre thick, which Anne Blanchet has cut into the mass. This fault breaks the diffusion of the light, making it darker beyond the slit. The artist has also cut several of these slits in a sheet, organizing them to suggest a door frame, the corner of a ceiling, the steps of a stairway. Depending on the side from which these sheets receive the light, these “drawings” have reverse angles.

Viewers are likewise prompted to go back over their perceptions, shifting from fascination to questions, first invaded by a quiet, contemplative atmosphere, and then overcome by doubt. What seemed simple and obvious has become disconcerting. The eye, for example, records the infinitesimal nature of what separates the clearly defined from the diffuse.

Anne Blanchet has a certain deftness when it comes to entangling intellect, affect and the material. By taking them each the wrong way. The result is these tough, heavy blocks of plexiglas which she puts across as light and imponderable. So it is, too, with the surrounding, impalpable light, to which she lends a consistency within an enclosed space. And the same applies to the transformation of geometric rigour into a malleable, supple, changing variable. All it takes is a blur between a layer of shade and a layer of light to see a non-existent line. The subtlety of Anne Blanchet's method actually resides in the way she restricts herself to simply nudging along what one might ideally imagine, and what one would much like to understand.