Caroline Duchatelet

Caroline Duchatelet
Period: 2008-2009
Profession: Plastician Resident artist at Villa Medici from October 2008 to September 2009 Caroline Duchatelet’s research focuses on landscape, in the broadest sense of the term. She uses three media for this approach: with light, waves of white or color whose intensity varies over time. With sculpture, simple forms that reveal the surroundings, that receive color, shadow or light, that reveal space. With video, to capture a movement, a motif. A writing of time worked in its luminous and colored component and in its relationship to space. Towards a sensitive abstraction. It’s a work about the moment, a work placed in time, that proposes moments rather than objects, ephemeral and fragile events – the sharing of a moment of presence in the landscape. “When we begin to feel in terms of landscape, then the place where we find ourselves is no longer understood from landmarks or symbolic anchors, it becomes unhinged. A door is opened, or rather the architectural box expands. Place makes way for landscape, for a moment-of-the-world. By this I mean the sense of landscape as an event of openness to the world that is not already represented. It’s a moment in which each person is part of the world, and doesn’t look at it as they might at a spectacle (…) Landscape has no limits and little support from the ground, being rather an exchange between beings, things and the moment.” Catherine Grout, excerpts from Traversées, catalog Sur le pas, Caroline Duchatelet, ed. la fabrique sensible, 2005.