Artist: Céline Vahsen
Exhibition title: Beyond Hues
Venue: E.A. Shared Space, Tbilisi, Georgia
Date: May 19 – June 20, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and E.A. Shared Space, Tbilisi
Céline Vahsen is an artist based in Brussels, Belgium. She works primarily in textile as a medium. Needless to mention, weaving as a practice is historically related to female labor, mostly invisible and traditionally disregarded as practice of art for it being too domestic, decorative and often utilitarian. However, or exactly for this reason, stemming from the perspective of a female artist, Vahsen departs from the idea of the vowen fabric belonging only to domestic and utilitarian realms, turning it into a contemporary art language uniquely developed by herself.
Using material such as organic cotton, repurposed wool and at times cashmere, natural pigments she creates at the studio while grinding the roots and barks of various vegetation, Vahsen creates work standing out with its contemporaneity. The historical dialogue between the digital and handcraft, HTML writing and weaving is also present. Her work almost creates a vibrating digital surface, documenting which is nearly impossible by a camera. The patterns created within the two-dimensional surface remind the viewer of various reflective surfaces, such as a gasoline puddle, or a fast-running river and other fluid constantly flowing entities.
Vibration of the color is probably what best describes her work presented at ‘ყველაფერი’ – Beyond Hues. As hanging on the walls, the abstract pieces create almost affective experience of the space. The pink, violet, off-orange and gray shades color the light and fill the rooms creating an uplifting spatial experience. It almost feels that the usual neutral colors of the walls of the gallery space share these colors.
There is a certain aspect of site-specificity to the Vahsen’s recent series made especially for the occa-sion of the show. Abstract and reflective by visual, her work directly reflects some of her experience of Georgia, which she had a chance to visit nearly a year prior to the opening. Some of the works exhibited refer to various objects and natural phenomena spanning the river Mtkvari, Soviet Modernist architecture surrounding the actual space of the exhibition, 18th century Persian mirror ornaments of Tbilisian interiors and other. Yet, eclectic as it sounds, Vahsen achieves a subtle harmony and balance within the composition and color schema of the series.
‘ყველაფერი’ – Beyond Hues as the title suggests refers to the original meaning of a color in Georgian language, which is more than a color, translating as everything, all the colors of “every thing”. It is not by chance, that the artist was inspired by the meaning of this word in a culture different to her own, where colors are regarded as conceptually, existentially and politically loaded by a broader meaning. It’s as if, she too gives deeper and more complex meaning to the colors of her own, stressing that the work is perceived as beyond the hues, something more and other than just the material.
-Elene Abashidze
