Isabelle Hupfer’s childhood in Quebec left her with a taste for the open sea, a need for wide open spaces and fresh air, and an attraction to the outdoors that accompanies her various creative phases.
Her frailties, first cultivated by the dancer and the lawyer, will end up nourishing the artist, from legal drawings to comic strips, along an uneven path, from wastelands to galleries, from encounters to rebounds.
Reflecting six years of relative isolation in close proximity to nature, this selection resounds like a collection of intimate notes emerging from a long period of confinement. Fittingly, birds, mountains, women and sometimes children – particularly ‘the angry one who breaks his toys’, she points out – are at the heart of this series. The twenty-two drawings on show are the result of a meticulous choice of medium, format and support. On very fine paper – ‘a little blotting paper, a little Japanese paper’ – Indian ink, sometimes mixed with glue, imposes its colour and texture in a unity of form that opens onto a diversity of subjects and emotions.
Provided that the observer is willing to take the first step by offering a pure gaze, without making value judgements, a whole silent and secret people is revealed in the mystery of its life, with its din, its movement, its gestures and its landscapes. A small, active and contemplative memorial society, whose warmth and even possible collective benevolence will never be able to overcome the vertigo of individual identity that explodes here, as it does in James Agee: ‘…but will not, no, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.’
So who are you, Isabelle Hupfer? Without completely solving the enigma, this first presentation
marks a return to the city that is full of meaning: bringing to city-dwellers the message of simplicity
inherited from Walden or Life in the Woods, a gentle resistance to modernity through example,
humour and line, daring to throw ink at a time when the freedom of each individual is no more than
a ‘screaming void’.
Frédérik Brandi
