Agathe de Bailliencourt, Couleur du Temps 10 (2013), acrylic painting on raw linen canvas

Agathe de Bailliencourt is a French artist currently based in Berlin, but her name is familiar to the local art scene. She lived and worked in Singapore for many years in the 2000’s, when she became an integral member of the local art community.

For Singapore Biennale 2006 she created a painted installation at Tanglin Camp, where she covered the inside of the old barracks with large scale doodles and sketches using blue paint. Her work was also selected for the advertising of Singapore Biennale 2006, it was used for the festival’s logo and shared across all of the Biennale’s platforms.
From 22 – 31 August 2014, she participates in this year’s Singapore Night Festival organised by the National Museum, where she unveils a new installation called Landscape by Landscape in collaboration with Singapore’s Institut Français, followed by her solo exhibition at Art Plural Gallery from 3 September – 3 October 2014, where she presents her latest series of works called Couleur du Temps.

Couleur du Temps series is inspired by a 1974 French film by Jacques Demy. In the film, there is a sequence about this idea of “color of time”, a surreal image where Catherine Deneuve is wearing a dress on which, as a moving pattern, clouds are passing by.

“’Couleur du temps’ means ‘Colour of time’ and also ‘Colour of the weather’. In French the word ‘Temps’ means both time and weather and I like this idea that my work deals with both. I mean the relation of the two: time and weather. I think it’s very interesting, imagining what an image of a landscape could look like.” the artist says.
The series Couleur du Temps deals with the question of horizon, as one of painting’s most basic acts in defining time, space, and a scale of infinity. By applying an extended version of watercolour-technique on untreated linen canvas, de Bailliencourt turns the perspective of a romantic tradition of landscape painting, the imagination of a distant past, towards an open futurist vision. The untreated linen fiber reacts to the painting material in an extremely sensitive and almost uncontrollable way. At the same time, every action is irreversibly visible, laying bare the entire procedure of producing an image of a landscape. Through an elaborate method of repetitive movements, of slow sedimentation of colour and of recording the process itself, the artist establishes the landscape with a single horizontal line, reminding the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto. The paintings are built up as a complex layering of somehow “responsive” shades of colour. Exploring the idea of a third category beyond contradictions such as nature and artificiality, Agathe de Bailliencourt follows an intuitive exploration through a non-representational space. More than creating an image, Agathe de Bailliencourt is interested in creating an environment that is open for the viewer.

Exhibition:     Agathe de Bailliencourt: Water, Colour, Recordings
Dates:     29 August – 03 October 2014
Venue:     Third Floor – Art Plural Gallery, 38 Armenian Street
Hours:     Monday – Saturday, 11:00am – 7:00pm
Info:     www.artpluralgallery.com or email info@artpluralgallery.com