TROU NOIR
The black hole is a region of space where the force of gravity is so strong that nothing can break out of it. As research currently stands, no direct observation of the black hole can be done. However, it may detected by the action it exerts on its environment.
In French, « black hole » also refers to a blackout, a transient loss of memory.
As to « hole », it generally evokes cavities, orifices, slopes, recesses, disappearances, or lacks. Christelle Familiari broaches astrophysics as well as science-fiction, areas with strong connotations of masculinity, but also anything related to holes (female genitals, non-fulfilment, absence, emptiness, etc).
Christelle Familiari is one of many contemporary artists expressing themselves through different practices – performance, collage, lithography, video, sculpture, and installations. She designed this exhibition as a set of variations, connecting each piece to one or several others using different processes.
For instance, the very strange vertical sculpture that welcomes visitors (« Divers, » which translates as « Miscellaneous ») is the domestic version of a sculpture designed for public space (a proposal for a public commission), which was itself built after the three-dimensional modelization of a collage reproduced on the invitation card for the show. The photographs on display in the first room were taken before, during, and after an exhibition the artist recently had at the La Criée arts centre in Rennes. At the back of the room a huge, spherical white shape stands out on a grey wall (« Entrelacs, » or « Interlace »), the result of interlocking modules made of white sheathed wire repeatedly intertwined, at once an erection and a collapse.
The evolution of previous work by the artist can be traced back in a series of lithographs (« Ensemble vide, » or « Empty Set »). The set is designed on the model of animation drawings, with the qualification that, since it is lithography after all, the same stone was used every single time.
Some images also announce what is to come, as is the case with the three videos made in three different public places in Berlin. Each of them features a character wearing a full black skirt, and a vaguely human form moving in rather odd ways (crawling alongside a bench, awkwardly running back and forth, sitting still, hunched on a spinning roundabout). Spinning, running, crawling: in the videos these three basic acts appear both absolutely ludicrous and mysteriously enticing.
As must be obvious by now, Christelle Familiari plays on form and formlessness, softness and hardness, fullness and emptiness, exhibition and disappearance, constraint and abandon, construction and carelessness. In her world, neither pink nor blue dominates. In fact, there is only one color in the exhibition: grey.
(Elisabeth Wetterwald)
