Lundi is for Sarah Tritz a new opportunity to occupy and manipulate the space of gallery anne barrault. This new project has developed at the same time as Diabolo chews gum in the rain and thinks of ass, a solo exhibition of the artist at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard from November 24th to January 9th 2016.

If Sarah Tritz’s works bloom through plenty of forms (sculpture, painting, collage...) as the exhibition at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard attests, at gallery anne barrault, they are mainly on paper.

A new monograph on Sarah Tritz, published by Editions Tombolo Presses, is due next January 2016.

"We do not know what a dinosaur is. We guess. Thanks to putting together pieces of fossils. This is the additive method of work; which Rodin used too. But the added being is a supposition. What is genuine is each part, each “fragment”- in itself. It is the same with man, a potential fossil." - Per Kirkeby, Rodin, La Porte de l’Enfer, 1985

Sarah Tritz’s exhibitions must be considered as collections of fragments. These fragments are sculptures, bas-reliefs, paintings, drawings, collages, those made by putting things together. The graphic pieces on the walls work like the vanishing points of the exhibitions. They catch the eye of the visitor, and incite him to wander in the space of the room. Some act as windows opening to an elsewhere, and invite one to project oneself mentally towards other spaces. Thus the works on paper and the sculptures complement each other in the exhibitions, but in Sarah Tritz’s practice as well. As a matter of fact, each type of work demands a different time to do it. When the big sculptures require a long time of preparation, the graphic productions, because they are easy to make, seep in the artist’s everyday life.

At the same time as her exhibition Diabolo chews gum in the rain and thinks of ass at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Sarah Tritz proposes Lundi, an exhibition made up only of works on paper, at gallery anne barrault. The artist has chosen the title accurately. The word completes the title sentence of the exhibition at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard. It is also the beginning of a new week when we go back to daily life, and reminds one of the constant renewal of a cycle. Monday, the day when Sarah Tritz works in the little studio adjoining her house, not very far from her domestic chores.

The artist has made Diabolo, questioning the representation of an incomplete, split up body. She summons various techniques and artistic periods, which collide with each other. Lundi echoes this heterogeneity. Several families of works on paper are present, and they all have in common to be more or less related to the representation of the fragmentation of the body:

-Thus the “representations” take on the shapes of pure objects or bodies, accurately suggesting the original models (Le gant-the glove, Le luminaire- the lamp).
The “stylized bodies *“ represent archetypal and smooth bodies (mannequins, gymnasts, cartoon characters) which become a surface, such as Brigitte or Sluggo – the latter, from the comic strip Nancy & Sluggo by Ernie Bushmiller, appears as a pop sculpture in the exhibition Diabolo. These disembodied bodies present a counterpoint to the organic and defective ones usually produced Sarah Tritz.

-The “quotations*” are representations from memory – or from images - of the works of other artists (Portrait de l’artiste à travers Picabia – A portrait of the artist through Picabia – from La mariée - the bride - by Picabia, Teary eyed from The drowning girl by Roy Lichenstein). Sarah Tritz fully takes hold of the chosen works, without bothering about exactness. Her appropriating them must be seen as wild and passionate tributes.

-The “collages*” are made with the pieces of paper from discarded counter-forms, drawings or bad paintings which are reframed and cut up, then put together. In the artist’s practice all that is dismissed, weak, defective deserves its place.

-To complete the types quoted above, the “backgrounds*”are meant as spaces of projection on which, more freely, the visitor may, as he likes, put the bodies of the characters met in other groups.

Lundi balances between the mise en abîme of Diabolo and on the contrary the exhibition of how it came into being.

Sarah Tritz assembles. She picks up pieces from the world around her, like a doctor Frankenstein delivered by Paul Thek and Helen Frankenthaler: door handles in the shape of female bodies of Paris Modern Art Museum here, the color of a skin met in the tube there, and the photocopy of a page from a catalog of Cathy Wilkes.

This construction by addition appears in each work taken separately, but also it allows one to link more precisely different scenarios between the works, and the two exhibitions. However, this assembling is never completely finished. Sarah Tritz gives the visitor the necessary room for him to move physically in the space, but also to add his own mental images within the works on paper, or to finish in his mind the fragmented bodies of the sculptures. In this way, Sarah Tritz’s works do concern everyone. They invite one to interact, to complete the work, so that it may be whole at last.

Émilie Perotto.

*The artist’s words.