The material nobility of art
About the work of Caroline Achaintre, whose large-scale works in tufted wool, basketry and ceramics are increasingly visible on the contemporary art scene.
Tufted wool, ceramics, basketry... Because her work is representative of an evolution of the contemporary scene towards works that assert their materiality, Caroline Achaintre lends herself this month to the game of conversation with Romain Mathieu in the anniversary issue of Artpress, the magazine of contemporary art that celebrates its 50th anniversary with an overview of the major trends of today. The art critic and teacher at the Ecole supérieure d'art et design de Saint-Etienne, co-curator of Après l'école, the Artpress biennial for young artists, has always been interested in craft practices in contemporary art. That is to say, practices that combine art and craft techniques. A trend that seems to have the wind in its sails again, even if the "Arts and Crafts" movement born in England in the 1860s had ceased to develop there shortly after the end of the Victorian era, not without having largely influenced Belgian and French Art Nouveau, both in the fields of visual arts, architecture, decorative arts, paintings and sculptures.
Represented since 2017 by the art gallery "Art: Concept" in Paris, Caroline Achaintre presents works of art for sale in the form of hybrid creatures, abstract and figurative at the same time, transforming the exhibition space into a kind of theatre where half-fantastic, half-fantomatic characters interact, inspired as much by European carnival, Primitivism, German Expressionism, science fiction or Sigmund Freud's "disturbing strangeness". His installations, in which large coloured "tapestries" dialogue with anthropomorphic ceramics, where amphibian faces and fetish or carnival masks rub shoulders, are as much a commercial display as an ethnographic cabinet.
"Is invoking the fantastic or animism a way of showing another relationship to the world, to nature?" asks Romain Mathieu to Caroline Achaintre. "There is certainly a link. For me, art is a means of escape. It's a door to another way of seeing things or making them move. The artist, born in 1969 in Toulouse, grew up in Germany before studying in London and has seen many doors open. Her work today bears witness, on the one hand, to the singularity of her path, which led her from a forge in Germany to the textile workshop at Goldsmiths College in London, and on the other hand, to the eclecticism of her work, the eclecticism of her inspirations, which have led her to draw on the claimed primitivism of Die Brücke as well as the post-modern design of the Memphis group, the surrealism of André Breton, the commedia dell'arte, the primitive arts according to Picasso and urban cultures.
In his work, the artist takes traditional techniques, such as tufting, the application of woollen hair to the reverse side of a canvas, ceramics or basketry, to breathe life into the drawings in which all his works of art currently on the contemporary art market have their origin. The idea is to evoke the possible coexistence of several characters within the same being and the tensions that this duality generates. "I think we are much more than one character," Caroline Achaintre tells Romain Mathieu in artpress. "I've really made a lot of work with the idea that more than one entity must share a body. There is a shift between the object and the subject but also a coexistence between different subjects. This aspect opens up a relative performativity of the pieces. I have only done one performance but I like the fact that the works have this potentiality. The strength of Caroline Achaintre's work is to question our own capacity to be in the world as individuals defined by a complex and multiple identity.
In addition to the art galleries where they are present, her works of art are today also part of several public collections: CAPC in Bordeaux, Tate Britain in London, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris, FRAC Aquitaine in Bordeaux and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims. It must be said that the last few years have also given him a high profile thanks to prestigious solo exhibitions. Such as the Tate Britain in 2015, the MO.CO. in Montpellier in 2019, the CAPC-musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux and the Giuliani Foundation in Rome in 2020, the Kunstmuseum in Ravensburg in 2021... not to mention the recent group exhibitions in which Caroline Achaintre took part: Flames, at the Musée d'art moderne in Paris in 2021, and Contre-nature at the MO.CO. in 2022.
Hence Romain Mathieu's question: "How do you see the art scene in France and in England? Do you see any differences between the two? To which the artist, now living in London but fascinated by what is happening in France in contemporary art, can indeed answer that she has "the impression that this opening to materiality took place in France earlier than in the UK and certainly earlier than in Germany. When I started working with tufting - they call it tapestry now but it's not woven - I always had to justify or classify it: is it art or craft? Is it post-feminism? Which is already a better question. Others asked me: why do you make things with your hands? Nowadays you see a lot of artists working in this way. I felt that there was a certain openness in France, especially when I started my work with ceramics.
As Romain Mathieu points out to Caroline Achaintre, "you have indicated that your decision to use wool was a conceptual choice, linked to your interest in the concept of 'disquieting strangeness', and not that of a craft practice. Nevertheless, in your work, the materials, the hand, play an essential role. Basketry was then added to wool and ceramics. So there is a link to the craft. After stating that she had worked as a blacksmith before becoming an artist, Caroline Achaintre assumes that during her two years of art studies in Germany, she first "captured the spirit of what I call post-conceptual work", and that she "tried to get rid of materiality". Film, photography, she then started combining media when she joined Chelsea College, "but very soon I started making objects again". The artist is perfectly clear: "I think I've always had these two affinities but I could never deny my attraction to materiality."