MOODS IN A ROOM

Catherine Balet’s new series Moods in a Room plays with virtual reality by mixing pictorial textures and digital photographic elements. Using images she collects from her personal archives, she superimposes them in multiple layers, giving a material feel to the unreal and a virtuality to her material images. The resulting compositions reveal the various states of consciousness of the artist, and illustrate her commitment to endlessly explore the dualities between content and absence, space and surface. Fannie Escoulen, curator, writes: “ …Catherine Balet has been building for years the successive layers of a memory sedimentation, a palimpsest, drawing references to the great movements of painting…. Hockney, Bacon, Picasso and so many others invite themselves to her table, interacting with the work in progress. Yet the artist deliberately frees herself from the great masters and feeds on many other materials. And it is indeed in this overflowing imagination, in this irrepressible desire to express the world around her, that Catherine Balet reveals our desires, fantasies and fears in the open and claims, in an artistic posture at crossroads, a great freedom of expression, embracing the possibilities of creation with its ever-expanding limits.”