Past

Les Noms Secrets

Hidden Names

10/10/2015 - 11/07/2015
1/15
Les Noms Secrets
installation view

Les Noms Secrets
archeological matter

Les Noms Secrets
Hard shell collar and its box

Les Noms Secrets
4 fungi

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Hard shell collar, 2015
necklace made of painted diary shells and linen
82 x 63 x 24 cm
Unique artwork, available

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Funghi Column C, 2015
die cut ceramic papers
210x28 cm
Unique artwork, available

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Armillarea #1, 2015
Paper from the artist diary
34x41 cm
Unique artwork, available

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Armillarea #2, 2015
Paper from the artist diary
34x41 cm
Unique artwork, available

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Armillarea #3, 2015
Paper from the artist diary
34x41 cm
Unique artwork, available

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Armillarea #4, 2015
paper from the artist diary
34x41 cm
Unique artwork, available

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Position, 2015
die cut painted diary pages
71,5x44,5x5 cm
Unique artwork
courtesy Galerie Dix9 Hélène Lacharmoise, available

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Suaire, 2015
Clay imprints on linen
circa 264x105 cm
Unique artwork, available

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Archeological Matter installation, 2015
clay, linen, cardboard, string, metal
Unique artwork, available

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Archeological Matter #2, 2015
clay, cotton, linen, cardboard
41x20x7 cm + plexi box frame
Unique artwork, available

Paula de Solminihac
Paula de Solminihac
Opus nigrum #3, 2015
Digital print on glossy paper
43,8x33 cm
Edition of 3 ex, available

Press release

Rising figure of the Chilean art scene, Paula de Solminihac produces singular works where privacy and artistic practice  are closely  linked. For over ten years, her artistic investigation has its focus on ceramic and is fundamented from the perspective of contemporary archeology : the artist seeks to put attention on processes rather than objects, systematizing the study of material activity as a specific field of art.


Paula de Solminihac refers to the Triangle Culinaire pointed out by Claude Levi-Strauss to proceed with her own work: modeling the clay, cooking with fire, getting a recipient as the prime form to contain food. It also relies on the dynamic analysis of technology, term proposed by André Leroi Gourhan, which extends the analysis of technique to the movements made on the material.

Meanwhile the artist is an archeologist of her own acts. Her life and work are closely related. She keeps a diary where she carefully notes and draws her thoughts about her daily life and experience. This notesbook, a kind of mental map, itself becomes object of her investigations. It is thus a memory-oriented work - how to fix the memories - in which the artist follows some memory art principles studied by Frances Yates *. In this art she found a method to relate exterior appearances with the subjective dimension of who remembers by printed images in the mind.

For her first exhibition in France, Paula Solminihac presents a specific project emerging from a residency conducted on February 2015 at the  Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Colombia). The result of a grant awarded with the support of  Galerie Dix9, this research was first destined  to make contact with the natives of the area, known as the first Latin-America potters. Some  works made from this trip will be shown in the major exhibition Ceramix** organised by three European institutions.

Diaries of a metamorphosis, Hidden Names bring together works from an excavation of the artist own experience in Santa Marta and represent reminiscent vestiges of archaeological finds. The unknown or unnamed are part of it, and the title given to the exhibition was inspired by a children’s conversation overheard by the artist – about body places that do not have a name. The works allude the fragility of culture in front of nature and time’s buffering. They testify of a  devastated and extinct world like survivors of a catastrophe promoted by elements like water and fire.

Archeological matters, a kind of fossil cocoons, are clay stones obtained by a natural modeling. The artist used some colorful clay remains, dry and hard traces of earlier pieces. She moistened them back, wrapped in clothes and submerged in water and sand. While recovering its initial softness, the clay adopt  new forms that are like fossils cocoons. In Levi Strauss’ transformation chain this  would be a regression – from dry raw to moist raw. The Cascaras, a kind of shells, are made from the pages of the artist’s diary. They may be solid, but also soft, like those envelopes in linen and cotton. Like the stones, the Cascaras symbolize the very essence of alchemy, that can be resumed by “everything that has been, is and will be”.  Shown as a necklace, the Cascaras point out the recurrence of the circular shape,  a sign of the production cycle and a constant renewal. The paper drawings give a form to vacuum. Bypassing the empty spaces in her daily notebooks, the artist creates a register code of the absent and lets  imagine a story. Victoria is the redoing of the Victoria Amazonica, a type of lotus found in the Amazonia. In addition with its beauty, it has that peculiar structure that can  hold on kids while floating. Armylaria combines a fungi scientific definition and notes from the artist diary. Both have in common the effort to define the undefined as it is a pond or a raw clay.

Based on a structuralist analysis of ceramic, with a distinction between raw and dry, Hidden Names reveal a thought related to alchemy,metamorphosis and the eternal cycle of life.

** Mainly the four classic rules that lead the Ad Herennium

**exhibition Ceramix at Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, NL (Oct 16 to Feb 5. 2016), at la Maison Rouge, Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris and Cité de la Céramique de Sèvres (Spring 2016)


 


The exhibition is supported by the Chilean embassy in France, Engie Chile and François Lurton company