OCTOBER NOVEMBER 2022 / IN THE CLOUDS / Béatrice Pontacq, Painter by Caroline Clavier, photos Nicolas Millet
In her studio-house in Bordeaux, the artist Béatrice Pontacq works with the material to tell the mystery, the life and the impalpable. His traces and games of strata cultivate the depths of the invisible between strength and softness. Like an immersive invitation, the vaporous lightness of charcoal and the powdery whiteness of clay blur the boundaries of his imaginary cartography.
THE EXPRESSION OF MYSTERY
Three red clouds and three white clouds, intertwined at night, on the mountain, Béatrice Pontacq gives her works titles that take their time, like her and like her silent paintings from which it is difficult to detach, believing to see something that we grasp and that escapes. An invitation to contemplative immersion posed in hollow in his landscapes of strata, worked by large flat areas of materials and suspended time. “Looking at the sky, wondering what it is made of, unraveling the secrets of the afterlife. Emptiness is filled with imperceptible things, this vagueness and mystery fascinates me.” It all starts with the clay loaves that her mother handles for her sculptures and that she has had at will, at hand, and has been since childhood. The material, the tactile and sensual manipulation are still invited today on the linen canvas and drive the gesture. They lay the foundations on which charcoal, oil and pastel are juxtaposed or rather “affixed”. “I wanted a work of ‘reconciliation’ of antagonistic elements. Poor, matte, crumbly clay and gilding, symbol of richness and divine light in traditional iconography, respond to each other. Duality interests me but it is complementarity that I explore.” Delicate and reserved in life, Béatrice Pontacq cultivates a taste for erasure filled with meaning. “So close and so far” writes in one of its catalogues the art historian Corinne Szabo. The undulation of indeterminate traces, filigree forms, blur and impermanence illustrate the duality of full and empty, from presence to absence, letting emerge little by little the immateriality of previous lives. To translate it, charcoal and the multitude of its small coal dots bring this vaporous lightness, this fragile evanescence between strength and voluptuousness, ranging from deep black to the transparency of light gray, depending on the thickness of the line. In the same way, the powdery whiteness of the clay promotes the feeling of misty foam. Recently, the choice of abstraction in its temptation to grasp the invisible, is approaching more formal things. With his series “Nuages”, the artist summons the figurative to question the ephemeral again, this time from the mirages of the sky. The Italian frescoes of the Quattrocento, both in the intensity of the colors and in the disappearance of past images, nourished his imagination very early. Transforming this melancholy into poetry is at the heart of his creative work. The choice of large format canvases accompanies it. It promotes this meditative immersion. the eye is magnetized by mystery, the illusion of forms and fleeting movements. Like living screens, his works play on attraction, suspended time, plunging the gaze into silent daydreams. Antoine Vignault, in his art gallery in Toulouse, Oneofakind, presents the artist’s works, associating them with a selection of design pieces and other rare objects.
