Caroline Lopez

Then comes the sea, the cliffs of Étretat, in a radically pared-down writing: watercolour erases almost everything, keeping only the essential — a breath, a trace, a light.

After a passage through engraving, another shift occurs with this series of chairs from the Jardin du Luxembourg. In a single gesture they gather what had until then run through her work: deconstruction, stripping away, simplification. Here the line becomes central, almost sovereign, as if everything converged towards an economy of the sign.

More than that, her work opens deeply to exchange. She enters into dialogue with those who look at her works, attentive to their projections, to their stories, to what they come to deposit there. Some wish to see loved ones appear in them, others to project themselves. The image then becomes a shared space, inhabited by this circulation between the artist's gesture and the viewer's gaze.

The empty chair thus imposes itself naturally. Not as a lack, but as an open space. It also resonates with the "empty chair" of psychoanalytic thought: a place addressed to the absent one, to inner speech, to what remains present otherwise. Anyone can slip into it, deposit a memory, a silence, an invisible presence.

The chairs of the Luxembourg carry this memory of long time. They welcome the passings, the pauses, the waits, the conversations, and seem bound to remain while lives pass by.

In their arrangements, their orientations, the shadows they trace on the ground, they compose silent affinities, bonds without words.

Where her first drawings opened the world through deconstruction, this series opens a more inward movement: an invitation to project oneself into what is not said, into what remains within, discreet, buried, but alive.

Dr Olivier de Palézieux, Psychotherapist