Trésor

This second exhibition of Frédérique Nalbandian, called « Treasure » marks and importante step in her international artistic career:
- 2006 : personal exhibition at the Centre d'Art Intercommunal d'Istres, at the Ponchettes Gallery of Nice at the same time as her first exhibition at the Depardieu Gallery,

• 2007 : instalation « S'eaux », work in progress interior/exterior permanent at the Saignon en Lubéron, and the participation at the International exhibition of Sculptures/Instalation OPEN 07 in Venice, during the Biennal

• 2008 « one-woman-show » in New York, at the Roger Smith Lab Gallery in april 2008

In a world becoming more and more virtual everyday, where information circulates at high speed, Frédérique Nalbandian, rejects rigid, hard and compact material, prefering softer, more supple, malleable, easly modelable with the hands. Her sculptures and instalations, composed of plaster, soap, wax, and paraffine, envelope, cover, uncover, break, fragments, recomposes pieces of reality, unanimated objects and organic forms. The solid, liquid or gaz state of these substances creat a link between form and reality.

What stricts us the most is her scene setting of the material, passing from the contents to the container, and visa-versa.
We can't find in her work a strong requirement for reducing the image just like in the Arte Povera, but more the desir of saving the memory of the shape, the objects, the actions, the preexisting movements, by readapting them into sharp and singular language. By this act of tranformation and sharing, the artist and the public fully participate to the reaction of the elements and the events in coexistence.
Frédérique Nalbandian restores the capacity to foresee human existence under the angle of memory, as well as its strength and its instability. It's the idea translated into the material, which, through « physicisation », produces a cerebral anthropolical emotivity.

« Treasure », praise, derision or surviving:
- insignificante things, deposits, funds of gilded waist containers

• fragments of soap, nuggets or other components recovered from « Précipité I, II, and III »
  - an extremele shiny glass
  - water
  Frédérique Nalbandian

www.documentsdartistes.org/artistes/nalbandian/repro.html

In a world becoming more and more virtual everyday, where information circulates at high speed, Frédérique Nalbandian, rejects rigid, hard and compact material. Therefore Frédérique choses plaster, soap, wax, paraffine envelopping pieces of reality like objects but also organic forms like skin and human members.

We can't find in her work a strong requirement for reducing the image just like in the Arte Povera, nor a need to recover primary elements of nature. She tries on the other hand to focus on the memory of the object and the shape of the pre-existing material, transposing them at the same time into a warm and personal language.

Her work resembles in a way experiences of Individual Mythology in the 1970's, a time during which the art language became an instrument for recovering the extension of man's space, it's multiple directions and all it's imagination abilities.
The language used is one which extracts elements that have spread in our daily life, in order to seize the negative images ; a form which she will thereafter restore in plaster or soap. Her work device is to break with a hammer or disolve pieces of reality while exposing them on walls and floors of an exhibition spot of her choice.
That is how she achieves her project: by putting these fragments in direct contact with her audience who therefore takes part in an experience of high estetic value. She obtains through the fragmentation of negative images, enigmatic and unusual forms that maintain the eagerness of life. We can also witness through the plaster, a personal testomony of her ability. This desir of modifying reality is born without a doubt from her state of mind almost visualizing her own embarassment created and produced by the interplay of emotions.
Breaking reality and reconstructing it into what appears to be a new image, is a creative act of denunciation, but at the same time a gesture of love towards existence which the artist seemsn to want to constantly fill with meaning. In fact, through this act of transformation, the artist takes part, in the first person, in the events and things of life, as far as staying with them throughout an act of participation and mutual coexistence.
What strics us the most in Frédérique Nalbandian's creative doing is the procedure that sets the tactile material's caracter reduiced into fragments which recovers the power of reconstituting the strenght and memory of existence as well as the need to express ones identity. It's the « idea translated into material » that produces through it's « phisicisation » an intense and cerebral anthropolical emotivity.

Enrico Pedrini A creux perdus

Mater has been the object of my frist plastic research, and continues to be till this day ; the moter of my artistic preoccupation. It's imminence and it's reality induces a frame of reflexion worthy to be reconsidered in the place it occupies in the context of our society watched over by the steril becoming of our organization and communication methods always more virtual. Throughout it's different states, liquid, solid and gaz, it appears to me as a source of knowledge to which we cannot violate the rules, an art of........... an ethic. Paralely the qualities of concepts like the original, the state and life that I would like to account for in my sculptures and instalations. Thus I try with a subject derision to instaure a poetic around the subject which is preoccupying me : the existence, expressing the body, organism the emptiness,
On an empirical mode, since the begining of my experience, I've mainly used three materials: plaster, soap and wax (or paraffine). Materials with which i like to keep an experimental and direct approach. These substances are elaborated and arranged according to various technics: moulding, modelling, assembly and construction. Traditionnaly plaster is used as an intermidiat stage between glaise and bronze. By the use of prints, it is located here in a precarious way in an interval: a game between the disapearence of the model and it's reproduction truning the print into the original master-piece. The molding takes place on a part of the body an object or a site for the realization of in situ parts. As for the plaster it runs through ans is applied using bands to slitely dissimulate the object.
The soap and wax are materials of binary use, used for removing the mould as well as a direct component. Soap, a product of commun and intimate use, is a metafor of « life ». It's possible dilution confronts the idea of disappearence, loss and conversion.
Other materials were later introduced:

• a miror for reflecting/refelxion

• gold sheet related to the idea of inviolable figures

• leashes of sea, recovered objects or remains with which I've always worked, fossils, hints of memories

Furthermore, the exclusiveness of white colors (plaster, soap) and carmine red (wax tinted with pigments) contribute to the articulation of my plastic vocabulary. The purity of the white colors refer to traditonal sculptures. Whereas the carmine red, whose intensity varies accordingly, ecos blood plasma. These representations refer to a range of states and corporal forms:

• skin, fragments of human body, flesh

• circulation, sheaths, holes

• filters

A big number of hints also show weakness, restauration, material transformation (the passing of liquid to solid), wrinkles, furrow

In situ pieces:

• At the Depardieu Galerie, an in situ piece on the balcony, ecos driers of the dwellings around, a mesh of streched cable. These cables are used simultaneously as screens in the passing of a wire that i named « prises » (catches) (soaop hand prints) which when exposed to rain, melts and free the cables.

• At the Galerie Des Ponchettes, it's architectural ordinance, it's arches and pillars led me to create an installation ressembling a « cathedral and it's nave ». Two in situ pieces, installed from cables, soap and, ciment and plaster projections.

• Sculptures, instalation and mural pieces : modeling and plaster and soap molded pieces, as well as other projects based on recovered objects will be representes in the Galerie de Ponchettes and Depardieu, suggesting an alternation of forms negative and positive

Frédérique Nalbandian

http://www.documentsdartistes.org/artistes/nalbandian/repro.html
http://www.inailuzproduction.com/demonstration_nalbandian.htm