Tatiana Trouvé, Liberating Images

At the Centre Pompidou, Tatiana Trouvé is

presenting her Grand Atlas de la désorientation (June 8th—August 22nd,

2022, curated by Jean-Pierre Criqui, assisted by Annalise Rimmaudo). In this exhibition, her drawings invade the space, including the floor, in dialogue with her

sculptures. At the same time, the Gagosian Gallery is also devoting an exhibition to her in Paris until September

3rd, 2022. An opportunity for the philosopher Emanuele Coccia to analyse the “liberation” of images at the heart of

the artist’s practice.

For at least five centuries, the term “art” has generally been used to refer to a disparate set of practices for the manipulation and transformation of matter.These different disciplines have only one challenge in common: that of pouring a form of freedom into matter and expressing through it that which would otherwise be impossible to exercise, producing an object that frees anybody who encounters it and sees it. This is what art is: a set of objects freely produced, with no other purpose than the expression of the freedom of those who have produced them, a freedom that contaminates anyone who comes into contact with them.

For centuries, the production of images has meant the production of sensitive freedom: the coming into contact with traits, lines, colours, settings for the experience of freedom. According to a paradox about which much has been written, but which remains very mysterious, the multiplication of images in our society has been accompanied by a reduction in their ability to produce freedom, and to make it possible. Images are now everywhere: in the magazines and books we read, in computers, on city walls and on our phones. They have literally replaced our voices: phones, the machines that we used to circulate our voices in space, have become devices that allow us to speak through images. Yet, because of this, the experience of freedom in front of an image has become something very rare. Caught up in the instrumental circuit linked to the necessities of our daily existence, images seem to be increasingly assimilated to forms of injuction, to imperatives that allow us to consciously orient reality in one direction.

IMAGES-SUBJECTS

The exhibition of Tatiana Trouvé’s works at the Centre Pompidou seems to be a kind of antidote to this tendency. If called upon to find a formula to summarise the set of works—which stretch back over nearly three decades—one might refer to the unique and extremely difficult task of liberating images. Liberating images foremost entails (re)making them a space for the exercise of the freedom of art and of the artist: in a context where images are produced primarily by and for machines, how can we invent the new grammar of sensitive freedom? But liberating images also means making them available for free, non-instrumental use, capable of freeing anybody who contemplates them. The general title of the exhibition, Le Grand Atlas de la désorientation, which also corresponds to the title of one of the series of drawings on paper, must be approached with this in mind. The sum of works on display is intended to constitute an atlas, but the map must produce the opposite of what it usually serves to produce. An atlas is a very particular image: its purpose is less the representation of an external reality than the possibility of inhabiting it. The paradox of every atlas lies in the fact that in order to use it, to understand it, it is necessary to suspend the distinction between subject and object which is the basis of every act of contemplation: to read a map, it is necessary to carry out the mental process of identification with what one is looking at. We must imagine ourselves as one of the parts of the contemplated image, we must become line, colour, geometric form, in short, an image, in order to understand where we are and to subsequently contemplate reality from the point of view of the image. Each atlas effectively implies becoming the image of the contemplating subject, or becoming the subject of the image.This is precisely whyTrouvé’s work so often takes the form of an atlas: this was also the case for the installations of Prepared Space (2014-17) in which reality itself was transformed into an atlas.

To liberate images, you have to turn them into subjects. But that’s not enough. It is also necessary for images to free themselves from the slavery of the representation of reality: it is in the ability to represent reality,

De haut en bas from top: Il mondo delle voci. De la série from series Les Dessouvenus. 2022. Crayons de couleur, eau de Javel et cuivre collé sur papier marouflé sur toile coloured pencils, bleach and copper glued on paper mounted on canvas. 260 x 400 x 5 cm.

( © Ph. Florian Kleinefenn). The Guardian. 2022. Bronze patiné, granit, sodalite, marbre et onyx patinated bronze, granite, marble. 82 x 64 x 59 cm. (Cette double page this spread: Court. galerie Gagosian)

to announce it, that images lose their freedom and become tools, objects with which we cease to identify and in which we cease to live freely. This is the most original aspect of the works on display. It is not necessary to adopt the language of abstraction in order to free the image from its instrumental relationship with reality. It is enough to make images and drawings a realistic space for the alternative composition of reality. This is what all the series try to do, by means of different procedures and protocols. It is in this sense that these images produce, facilitate, and make possible a disorientation: not the spectator’s adhesion to a precise spatial or temporal reality, but the vertigo of an experience that cannot be related to any memory or place on the planet, and which nevertheless is not unreal.

PARADOXICAL MEMORY

This is a radical, extreme political act that runs absolutely counter to what most artists claim to be doing today. In the face of those who constantly defend a political use of art— that is, the use of artworks to guide the thought and action of spectators and exhibitors—Trouvé affirms the freedom of art in the face of any form of instrumentalisation, even one justified by good intentions.

Art must be disorientating, must make the world change direction within itself and not bring it back to the rather inept and vain satisfaction of those who always want to consider themselves on the side of the Good. Because an art that wants to console and reassure spectators that they are in the right place is only a form of catechism. In contemplating these works, we no longer know who we are, where we are, or when we are: this is precisely what art must produce, rather than seeking to confirm our opinions about the world.

To accomplish this task, Trouvé seems to have invented a new, paradoxical art of memory, which classifies the possible uses that we make of images to invert them one after the other: information, consolation, announcement, memory, orientation, the production of eternity, etc. The series titles themselves appear to be exercises of inversion of these purposes: Intranquillité, Les Dessouvenus, Le Grand Atlas de la désorientation. Thus, in the series De mars à mai, the artist works on the headlines of newspapers around the world, inverting the chronicle into a journey through a space-time that is both real and impossible to locate. A newspaper page is a dated image: a diary image that seems to take a realistic snapshot of the world. Each of these works seems to affirm that images must not bind us to the memory of the past but must free that same past—that same day, those same events, those collectively experienced and memorised moments—from a certain identity. Perhaps we should invent a daily use of images that does not freeze the past, but frees it with every act of memory. This is also what the drawings of the Dessouvenus series attempt to do. They seem to want to undo the logic of memory through compositions that challenge the opposition between dreams and perception. This is not only suggested by the use of colour (these drawings are made on paper with pencil and bleach). It is also implied by the composition of the images, which combine landscapes and elements of interiors or from a bourgeois studio. We cannot have experienced what is staged by these works, and yet, precisely because they are atlases, we cannot help but identify with them and feel that we have been there or are there now. So it is not only us who are disoriented, it is reality itself that gets lost in these dark surfaces that appear to be made of the same matter as dreams.■

Translation: Juliet Powys

Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher. Recent books: Philosophie de la maison (2021), Metamorphoses (2020).

Cette page this page: Notes on Sculpture. 2022. Bronze patiné et peint, aluminium peint et albâtre peint patinated and painted bronze, painted aluminium, and painted alabaster. 118,5 x 36 x 31,5 cm