PORTRAITS D’USAGE ET HORS D’USAGE – ISABELLE PLAT

Isabelle Plat in Multiland
 
“Is it a retrospective? Let’s say I’m going to reconstruct a little history from works I’ve already seen.” Isabelle Plat
 
1984. As a student, influenced by Russian Constructivism, Italian Futurism and Cubism, Isabelle Plat became interested in the fourth dimension evoked by Marcel Duchamp. At the time, notions of non-Euclidean geometries, relativity and probabilities, the infinitely small and the infinitely large, inspired her contemporaries with the idea of hidden realities in the universe. In her quest for access to imperceptible dimensions, the artist – whose name evokes a character from Flatland – has created a spiral sculpture of the same name, with electricity running through it. Time, space and movement, as well as shadows and experience, are now part of her work.
 
This is followed by a reflection on the ambiguity between sculpture and furniture, form and function. The artist developed the concept of “usable sculpture”. Using “objects of belonging” such as clothes and hair taken from people close to her, she creates inhabitable-sculptures, wearable-portraits into which one slips. Her pieces incorporate the spectator; who in effect become part of them, not merely touching them, but turning them into a kind of growth, halfway between a prosthesis and a living organism. In this way, they are relational objects that weave invisible links between beings and traces of life. Such is the case with this coat-chair in which we can settle, as if our body were taking its place in another. The latter is understood as a “space to inhabit”, traversed by other dimensions and subjectivities, both human and non-human. The artist’s relationship with her dog, her daily contact with the vegetables in her garden, nurture in her the idea of a continuity of life, where everything is caught up in strange meshes.
 
Soon, these “usable sculptures” became «usable portraits». Not in support of a certain humanism, but to include what had until then seemed inanimate or repressed by modern thought. These reversals are constant in her work. Indeed, many of her works turn inside out like gloves or socks. Back into the bowels of the animal or the earth, invagination and penetration operate silently in her works. When, in the 1990s, the artist created Jardin d’Alice au poireau – a leek crossing a table of granular medium, to show us what is hidden beneath the earth – the logics of function and belonging were dislocated. Once on the other side of the mirror, abstract and arbitrary boundaries (up/down, living/nonliving) no longer hold. Is it the leek or the table? What if the vegetable is to the table what our clothes are to our identity? In other words, the means by which a mode of existence or function appears. The work now becomes a “table’s portrait”. Alice continues her fall and wanderings through the ladders.
 
As a result, her works never cease to enter into new networks of references. This is also why the absurd is never far away in her work, displacing, deferring and provoking an irony capable of prompting side-steps, as in Aberration-poireau (1996) and Aberration-carotte (1996).
 
Basically, her works invite us to think about the system of relationships and resonances (visible or invisible) that are woven within ecosystems. From now on, the artist develops installations from fragments of previous pieces. She arranges, combines and assembles them to create “enlarged portraits”. Her works of felted (non-degradable) hair stand alongside used furniture that comes to life, and steel sculptures that reflect the environment. L’homme natté (1991) remains her modulor (in the sense of Le Corbusier). It cuts through space and reflects it, but also invites us to go beyond our human condition for new spheres of resonance between things, beings and the world. Like Flatland or L’allégorie de la caverne, Isabelle Plat aims for other dimensions to expand our knowledge and challenge our truths and beliefs.
 
Marion Zilio
 
MORE INFORMATIONS:
 
// Press release
// Isabelle Plat
// Portraits d’usage et hors d’usage (04/25-07/13/2024 | Brussels)