FRIBOURG.- In an expressive rendering of semi-conscious drift, Elise Corpataux’s (*1994, Fribourg) practice has developed around sentimental imagery. With their romantic tropes, her paintings evoke the passing of time, the variation of days, nostalgia. Often in counterpoint, mnesic markers throw up evidence of a psychic life in search of a formula for existence.

Life isn’t good it’s excellent, now on view at Kunsthalle Friart, constructs a panorama that is at once personal and destitute. In its deliberate sentimentality, affection is also the locus of humour, just where it hurts most. Corpataux’s painting evokes areas of contact between memory and art and the idea of a life as celebration.

Elise Corpataux has developed a painting practice around sentimental imagery. With their romantic tropes, her paintings evoke the passing of time, small daily variations and nostalgia. Often in counterpoint, memory markers throw up evidence of a psychic life in search of a formula for existence.

Her exhibition in Friart, Life isn’t good it’s excellent, is arranged in tiers in the depths of the exhibition space. It is presented as a succession of takes that reference various ways of evoking the relationship between imagery and desire. In the first painting Come back and stay (2023), visitors find themselves, by imitation, in a crowd blocking the view of a distant horizon. Beyond this foreground, a second painting B-b-b-b-baby (2023) is bathed in a powerful light, a mise en scène that produces an irreal image insisting on the relationship between physical sensation and mental perception. This text painting reproduces the words of a song, stuttering out love and loss. Like an idealised view of affection, the text turns on itself, swinging madly, in the name of love and/or art.

One discovers the far wall after passing through this methodical prologue. The artist’s painting is displayed in a palette of dabs, a soft geometry that rhythms the flow of images on the canvas. Density of memory and fragmentation of mind coexist in these pictorial compositions. Painting, letterpress and transfers dissolve into these wryly created collage-paintings, a counterpoint to the prosthetic content editor of the smartphone.

In Unknown Babies (2023), amulets, time capsules, memory artefacts create a mise en abyme of a story imbued with memory. Instructions incorporating figures and letters inscribe the artist’s paintings in an encrypted personal geography. In contrast to the contemporary dominance of assigning tags, catchphrases, soliloquy-mantras and bedroom pop extractions, take on a nagging sweetness, a mockery of the generic character of authentic experience and the clichés of a bovarist genre. Opting for a personal style denuded of any apprehension, raising expectations with regard to the purity of the commercial surface of her work, the artist continually revisits the process of construction of a personal narrative. Alert to the impact of technologies of attention on a mind never alone, her work quietly, progressively, extracts itself from considerations of who does what to record just another impression on the magic block of memory, just another certain something.

June 2, 2023 - July 30, 2023