Virginie Mossé at Mayeur Projects

Artist: Virginie Mossé

Exhibition title: Time as Desert

Venue: Mayeur Projects, Las Vegas, New Mexico, US

Date: March 17 – May 14, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Mayeur Projects

In the work of Virginie Mossé, objects, animals, artworks reveal the quiet power conferred to them by purity, since symbols have abdicated in the era of economic meaning. Cosmic forces are at play. Shamanism and romanticism meet concept in an abstract universe, where the personality of the artist, her spirit of sacrifice, like her intuitions, transmits the sense of modern tragedy. A tragedy that approaches its end.

Muses are at work: intuition precedes reflection, which then acts as a translation of intuitions. In these embodiments, meaning appears, meaning available to those who accept the artist’s invitation to slide, a kind of child’s play. For those who abandon themselves to this game, the experience of Mossé’s works leads to a penetration of a world of a rush of symbols – labyrinth, column, tree, barque….- phantom colors of humanism’s exhausted ideas.

Ideas to which only intuition can give back life, like a theater of shadows, an ultimate alert, before the imperial reign of archaic nature leads all culture towards a silent elsewhere.

It reminds us that the capacity, particular to Man, to perceive time and to project oneself in time is tied to abstraction. Literally: abstract figures from the real world, through the production of images in our brains, and then their translation in drawing and language: a process as old as humanity itself, which only becomes refined with the evolution of technologies. This neurobiological process, producer of illusions, constructs a world.

“Welcome to the desert of the real” said Baudrillard. Mossé brings us there. From prehistory to Antiquity, the Renaissance to Surrealism, from Modernism to the Contemporary, the density of time is reduced to a few motifs, inked on canvas or played out in holograms.

14000 years brought together in a breath, a reflection, a passage and translated in abstraction: Mossé reminds us of the translucid character of time, like contracted time, gathered up, invisible and yet so present as to reveal the physical and optical experience of the desert, or the simple gaze on our own lives, enlarged by the memory of man and the intuition of the immemorial.

The illusory space of the canvas is literally divided, revealed, underlined as well as emptied. It is open to philosophical ecstasy inscribed in the pattern of the grill on the surface of the canvas.

Virginie Mossé’s Time as Desert brings together work from her residency at the Caza d’Oro Art Center in the South of France, as well as other recent productions. Mossé was born in 1977 in France and currently lives and works in Berlin. Selected solo exhibitions include Heinz-Kramer Gallery, Hamburg, Berlin-Weekly Gallery, Berlin, Gängeviertel, Hamburg, Kreuzberg Pavillon, Berlin G, Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, Hamburg G. Selected group exhibitions include Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin. Kurator: Tina Sauerländer, Galerie Royal, München, Halle für zeitgenössische Kunst, Offenbach, Kramer Fine Art gallery, Hamburg, Nationalpark Harz G, De Zwarte Ruyter Rotterdam, NL.