Lignes de flottaison

A vital and delicate force, sensual, irrepressible, transports us silently
from the surface of matter to immaterial, unexplored depths.1
Christelle Balbinot was born in Ain, after a career as a stylist, she developed her approach
artistic from a metal wire and composes a material halfway between sculpture and embroidery,
thus creating a link between sewing and drawing in space, specifically in relation
with an exhibition space. Strongly focused on the graphic dimension, these achievements initiate
a journey in the intuitive sense of the term.
At the "Estienne workshop" in Pont-Scorff, her installation is based on a principle of immersion: she
plays with the two levels of this space, so as to make visible both the top and the
below one of his sculptures. Moving around becomes essential, it is a journey that
invites exploration, a bit like a diver discovering the seabed, a way of
experience an extraordinary freedom of movement. We discover these sculptures at the level of their
slice, within their material, we discover external and internal morphologies, a
question that runs through all the works in this exhibition.
Visual perception is inseparable from the entire body in the sense that sustained attention
of the visitor is expected. Both drawing and volume, these sculptures do not reveal themselves immediately,
they are neither fabric, nor fiber, nor mesh, but "presence", a presence which is found in part
in the shadow projected on the wall and the ground, like an elongation of his gestures and our gazes. The
Light is one of the elements that gives body to these entanglements, but, on the contrary, darkness
which is just as important, offers our conscience a question, that of the origin of the meaning
philosophical of the term.
We are in front and inside, we are between near and far, we are in the loop
of drawing. Drawing is like a breath that the hand would accompany and, in this strange
trajectory, a series of fleeting and uncertain anthropomorphic images occurs, a matter occurs
luminescent. Through the folds and postures, we feel the antique: the metal wire is nourished by a
archaic memory that comes to us in filigree. Matter is not volume, it is embodied, it
gives voice, she is indomitable. The work exceeds the mind and conscience of Christelle who
finds itself carried away by this black wind.
A curious silence reigns around the sculpture; one might think that once modeled this
mesh can create a void that inspires fear or at least the sensation of a phenomenon
energetic. The loop is that of an inside, an intimate space that transforms thousands of gestures
in solidified waves. We constantly return to these loops which seem to amplify; they take
form and disappear, they abound, they lighten us.
Hervé Bacquet
1 West-France, 22/10/2019