The four cartoonists elected by Artpress
About the 16th edition of Drawing Now Art Fair which takes place from 23 to 26 March at the Carreau du Temple in Paris.
From 23 to 26 March, the contemporary drawing fair Drawing Now Art Fair presents its sixteenth edition at the Carreau du Temple in Paris. Among the many Parisian drawing events held each year in March, the contemporary art magazine Artpress has been pacing the aisles for several years and its critics have chosen to honour four female artists with strong expressions for this sixteenth edition: Julie Doucet, represented by the Anne Barrault art gallery; Cyrielle Gulacsy, for the Anne-Sarah Bénichou art gallery; Chloé Poizat, Modulab art gallery; and Katarzyna Wiesiolek, whose artworks for sale can be found on the stand of the Eric Dupont gallery.
Of course, it is easy to imagine that the choice was not easy to make among the 2,000 or so works of art for sale signed by 300 different artists, who will be to be found among the seventy galleries gathered for Drawing Now Art Fair, from thirteen countries, bearing in mind that 30% are there for the first time or are returning after a long absence. The graphic creation of the last fifty years is thus particularly well represented, and we can see to what extent drawing has definitely found its place on the contemporary art market.
About Julie Doucet, who has been propelled to the forefront since she was awarded the Prix de la Ville d'Angoulême in 2022, the graphic designer specialising in art books and publisher Philippe Ducat recalls for Artpress that he discovered the work of this Quebecois comic book author at the end of the 1980s in Bruno Richard and Pascal Doury's photocopied fanzine, Elles sont de sortie. "The drawing was very trashy, which explains Bruno's taste for this girl who was quite different in the ultra-masculine fanzine world," he writes. Julie Doucet's modern outlook quickly earned her recognition from her peers and she was published regularly, notably in 1990 by the new French publishing house L'Association. Even if she then gradually abandoned comics in favour of drawing as a work of art in its own right, the publication of Maxiplotte, a compilation of the feminist Dirty Plotte that she self-published in the early days, augmented by unpublished works, brought her back to the forefront in 2021.
As Philippe Ducat writes, "Following the #MeToo movement and other feminist protests, she is becoming a kind of figure of contemporary feminism for the good reason that her stories have been transgressive and highly virulent towards androcentric masculinism from the start. She represents femininity with a crudity that seems to me inaugural. Although not a rocket scientist, I can't think of any other female artists who have ventured into this terrain where seduction is all but banished. The closest I can think of is Anne Van der Linden, but there is always a desire for seduction in her work. What is certain is that Julie Doucet's expressionist line and her taste for black and white are reminiscent of the greatest, such as Crumb, Vallotton, George Crosz, Willem, Vuillemin, Combas... And that if her characters are represented with a science of caricature and jubilant grotesquerie, some of them reminiscent of the so-called erotic drawings of Albert Dubout, tenderness and empathy are always perceptible, as in the photographs of Diane Arbus.
In the case of Cyrielle Gulacsy, who uses the pictorial medium and Indian ink as a means of experimentation, "she makes light the body of her work and thus auscultates immensity, embracing the impalpable of a reality that is reluctant to offer itself in totality," explains Maud de la Forterie, journalist and art critic, in her article for Artpress. "By taking the physical nature of celestial objects as his field of research, as well as space-time, electromagnetism and the diffraction of light, Gulacsy is above all looking for new forms of representation of an imperceptible reality where the sensory spectrum would have all the time in the world to flourish. His works are not so much about description as they are about piquing curiosity and pointing out sensation, the artist calling for sharing as well as perception. Referring to the "cosmic pointillism, carrying a universal symbolism" of the Parisian artist's artworks, the journalist evokes works such as those in the Visible Light series, initiated in 2018 and recounting the passage of white light through the earth's atmosphere, "that threshold where the invisible becomes visible". She also talks about the 2022 series, Solar Dynamics, in which the solar star takes pride of place and light diffracts through subtle gradations to appear in fine.
Journalist Julie Chaizemartin spontaneously sees "imaginary lives" in the artworks drawn by Chloé Poizat. The artist once confided to her his admiration for Marcel Schwob, author of the book of the same name, the 19th century poet and writer who lived in Chaville, on the edge of the same dark and magical forest that she herself explored with her eyes as a child growing up in Ville-d'Avray. And of course they share a taste for fiction and strangeness. Chloé Poizat gives birth to hybrid and fanciful beings on paper, but also in short videos composed from assemblies and collages of archive images and drawings. Their grimaces in a world full of chimeras from nature can be as sympathetic as distressing, like a Munch Scream. Chloé Poizat's metamorphic images may evoke Odilon Redon, Dali or Yves Tanguy, but the artist's stroke is nonetheless unique.
The extreme precision of Katarzyna Wiesiolek's works of art for sale, like the sensitive material of her drawings, fascinates Marc Donnadieu, art critic and curator specialising in photography and contemporary creation. The drawings of this Polish-born artist, who came to Paris in 2010 to pursue her studies in plastic arts, are almost photography. Her work, sometimes made of pulsating epidermis and sometimes of seismographic territories, is a drawn trace of reality, whose recurring themes are still life, the human body, light and shadow, reflection, dawn or dusk, the shoreline, snow-capped mountains, clouds, shooting star showers, planets or constellations, natural or technological disasters? And what could constitute its founding base", writes Marc Donnadieu, "is not only this melancholic feeling, this suspended or held time produced by certain carefully chosen situations, facts or things, but above all this meticulous and almost obsessive attention to almost metaphysical forms of absolutes that defy the laws of gravity as well as those of scale".