Tatiana Trouvé, A Quiet Life (Installation View), via Kamel Mennour
Currently on view at Kamel Mennour’s Paris exhibition space, artist Tatiana Trouvé has filled its rooms with a constellation of matter, clusters of material and physical elements that rise and fall int intensity, creating an elaborate physical narrative that moves the viewer through the gallery while offering little in the way of exterior context. Continuing the artist’s elaborate and intricate participation in multiple modes and movements simultaneously, the show is an impressive continuation of her practice.
Tatiana Trouvé, A Quiet Life (Installation View), via Kamel Mennour
Tatiana Trouvé, Navigation Map (Installation View), via Kamel Mennour
Trouvé’s work has long mined the language and materiality of the cluster, of massed objects and the attendant meanings that are effectively smuggled into the gallery with them. Trouve’s work, which often frames her objects as participants, agents, or even, in some cases, parasites, are more like subtle interrogations and reworkings of spatial politics, turning an arrangement of disparate elements into a series of works that manages to marry delicate biographical elements with more concrete references to create understated psychological landscapes. For her most recent exhibition at kamel mennour, Trouvé continues this mode of working.
Tatiana Trouvé, A Quiet Life (Installation View), via Kamel Mennour.
The pieces here seem to alternate between stand-alone sculptures and a distinct referential system, particularly when spatial logic and object relations come more directly into play. One can see elements like verticality or horizontality change from element to element, as diagonally sloping sheets of wood or metal point out to a vertical wall of clear material nearby, this same wall giving way to a sheet of black that runs along the floor. It’s particularly noteworthy that the artist’s work in the show was inspired by late-night visits to her studio, as if these elements and objects are rent from direct observation of her materials through the darkness, or even. through the bleary-eyed perceptions of the late-night hours. Stuck between the everyday aspects of the artist’s work and the shadowy interludes between each day, Trouvé seems intent on mining these moments of meditation and quiet to produce ever-more striking arrangements of work. In another room, this same concept is reflected through a series of parallels between hard industrial lines and the gentle, arcing lines of the natural world. Here, Trouvé’s masterful interruptions of distinctions between human states, human framings of the world in categorical concepts like the interior or exterior, are slowly but deliberately broken down.
Tatiana Trouvé, Navigation Map (Installation View), via Kamel Mennour
Alongside these works, the artist is also exhibiting at the gallery’s London location, where she has installed a series of architectural spacers, creating a series of phantom trajectories that pass through the space in an experience of constantly shifting and evolving divisions. Taking industrial materiality into a sort of perceptual improvisation in the gallery, Trouvé underscores just how impressive the junctures of precise construction and open modes of encounter can be.
Her work is on view in Paris through November 24th and London through November 10th.
Tatiana Trouvé, A Quiet Life (Installation View), via Kamel Mennour
— D. Creahan
Read more:
Tatiana Trouvé, Navigation Map [Kamel Mennour]
Tatiana Trouvé, A Quiet Life [Kamel Mennour]
