BEATRICE CASADESUS

Béatrice Casadesus resembles her own works. There is something infrangible in her clear gaze. Crowned with flaxen hair, her face radiates the very light that she infuses in her changing materials. Sweet looks, however, can be deceiving. Béatrice Casadesus began with sculpture. Then, her travels to Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia inspired a shift of focus: paper, and above, all the search for the point.

Light, the organizer of her work, cuts through the weave of the material, all the while playing tinkling, wintry, sunny music over a background of lilacs – some blue, some pink, some gold. Shimmering before our eyes, the light graces her work with one indistinct, milky, colour of swirling hues.

Béatrice Casadesus draws viewers in with the tempo of her chromatic breathing, creating an impressive ballet of unintentional recollections that transport us to the gardens of the old wise man of Giverny, to the beaded focus of Georges Seurat, and to the sfumato of da Vinci.

Maurice Benhamou describes Béatrice Casadesus’s works as, “Free, floating, simmering, yet lightweight in gravity, [as] Nietzche might have said.” Béatrice Casadesus’s light often recalls August blue skies, as transparent as a Fra Angelico, made from goodness only knows what precious material. Turquoise perhaps.

Béatrice Casadesus was born in 1942. She attended Edmée Larnaudie’s classes at the École des Arts Appliqués in Paris, and based her sketches on Masaccio, Piero de la Francesca, and Goya. She went on to study painting and sculpture at the École des Beaux-arts in Henri-Georges Adam’s studio.

By 1980, she was developing Tramaturgies, a process of erasing iconic content of certain famous pictorial models (Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the Fontainebleau school) by layering and making incisions. She became close friends with sculptor Claude de Soria.

In 1990, Béatrice Casadesus began the Blancs Volants series. The title (flying whites) refers to a phrase from the poet Shih-t'ao: canvases and folding screens in incised linen, playing off the alliterating French terms l'endroit and l'envers (right side and inside-out). This series then laid the groundwork for the book Le Grand Livre des Pas (The Big Book of Steps), a spatial environment for the Paris Opera’s school of dance.

In 2001, her focus switched as she launched Mues (moulting), a series of rumpled and wadded up paintings placed on the floor, and Peintures Sans Fin (Endless Paintings), huge rolls of paintings randomly scattered in the space. Rejecting the traditional vertical position for works of art, she has set out to find new modes of presentation.