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JORGE SATORRE
Divine Truth. Evidentiary Piaxtla. (Détail). 2008-2010.
Courtesy of the artist.
JUDITH SCOTT
Judith Scott suffered from Down's syndrome and
was a deaf-mute. Her sculptures are objects
wrapped in layers of wool. At a specialist artistic
institution for the handicapped that she attended,
she developed a style of art based on assemblage.
She would tie up objects she had found, covering
them with coloured threads or fabric ribbons.
Under the thick wrapping, the objects more often
than not lost their original shape, and yet they
could be called neither shapeless nor misshapen.
These sculptures can evoke cocoons or dolls,
knots, eggs, physical growths or ritual objects
with magic powers. Once the object was covered
to her satisfaction, Scott would lose interest in it,
put it to one side and pass on to the next work,
where she would repeat the process. Her approach
to art seems to have been one of gleaning,
covering, knotting and concealing. What her
aesthetic or symbolic intentions were cannot be
ascertained. Archive images of her at work reveal
the precision of her gestures and her choices
of materials, colours and textures, and also the
physical nature of the artistic act – the importance
to her of the tactile aspect.
M. C. tr. J.H.
Born in 1943 in Cincinnati (United States), died
in 2005.
Les Prairies's artists
Inspired by micro-history as formulated by the historian Carlo
Ginzburg, Jorge Satorre works from facts and stories about the
facts. He weaves interpretations around what is for him an
idée fixe, not to say obsession, namely that a fact once it has
been related becomes the story. In his oeuvre theory is mapped
perfectly onto practice. The methods he uses involve careful
thought about transmission and interpretation without, however,
being illustrative. The final installation often combines drawings
and documents and constitutes a prism with several facets:
documentary, historical, fictional and personal. The spatial
mechanism forms a mnemonic experience at both collective
and individual level. Jorge Satorre is engaged in micro-history
while simultaneously producing meta-stories. The concept of
point of view is actually incorporated into the production process
itself. This is evidenced in Divine Truth, for example, where he
invited several different people to make drawings of the same
story. This complex work, displayed here for the first time in its
entirety, is made up of several layers and it weaves together
various narrative elements. One occasionally loses the thread
of the narratives which the very pared down installation both
condenses and expands at the same time. The series of drawings
covered in black, "like an overexposed film", both contradicts
and suspends the didactic and evidential nature of the image in
question, turning interpretation into a quest and at the same time
creating a screen which draws the beholder deep into the images
– a screen on which he or she can project an interpretation.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1979 in Mexico (Mexique), where he lives and works.
Untitled (Title assigned : Poupée, 1992). Collection LaM Lille Métropole
musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut, Villeneuve d’Ascq.
Photography : Philip Bernard.
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