ARCHIPELAGO-LIKE
Archipelago-like, that is how Julie Polidoro’s work must be understood, both painted and drawn. A neologism borrowed to the thoughts of Edouard Glissant who, beyond the remarkable political commitments of the writer, puts to the fore the new meaning of a universal future. Some will name the latter, from a geopolitical angle as being multipolar; others will put forward the terms of fragmented”, or even “scattered”. For sure, the possible definitions – as it is truly what this is about here – are as rich as multiple and clearly engage man in a relationship to the world, his world, antihegemonic. By extension of this decentred thought, Julie Polidoro’s work acts as a murmur that agitates and balances our certitudes; that unhinges foundation stones, may they be spatial or temporal, to which we believe being strongty stowed: as to oppose the unicity of a law and a system to the polysemy of the world
In this regard the pictorial approach of Julie Polidoro rewrites, in a perpetual and everlasting movement, new cartographies endlessly regenerated in this sense. In the free paintings recently executed by the artist, the frame of the representation is as much blurry as if in the distance. The works are as many views snapshot from above, as it from a plane, that play on the indistinctness between realms, may they be those of land, sea, or even the sky. If the eye can discern a few lines or contours of what we are used to territorialize, through sight or speech, it presently appears quite difficult attributing them a definition. Furthermore, these landscapes hold within as much of invisible as of unspeakable, taking distance from the orthonormal scheme proper to cartography as generally understood. The few landmarks to which sight and understanding can rely to echo like entities as sparse as impermanent: clouds, islands maybe, a few words asserted, being as many snatches emerging from chaos. And here, laying bodies, floating horizontally as if rooted in a moment of serenity, identical to that of a fall or a terrestrial rest.
Julie Polidoro’s painting is an indexical work, the image of the sudden. Every painting has, in this regard, the physicality of a photogram on which the marks of time and space have come to print themselves fleetingly, both temporary and ineluctably incomplete. It is actually through vacuum, the lack of pictorial material that Julie Polidoro tackles her practice. The clouds and islets. these archipelago-like entities we evoked, are moduled by the vacuum and it is the shades of whites they host that do give rhythm to the painting, stopping the free mobility of sight and that do create these discontinuities in the understanding. The artist, by unveiling the gaps left to be filled, offers putting back together again a world commensurate with manhood, commensurate with his memory both incomplete and infinite.
Man can no longer think of time and space, northe world, as being a whole. He must absolutely let go and move away from the unique anthropocentric definition of the universe because, if bodies are actually really present and active, they are so as the receptacles of common resources: tuned in nature’s cedence, of its elements, both impermanent, discontinuous and deeply polysemic.