Artists

Clio Sze To

Press release

Echos is Clio Sze To’s second solo exhibition at Galerie Crèvecœur, after Pont de Sevres in 2023 — a series of pastels on paper and watercolours on silk, made in her family apartment on the thirteenth floor of a residential tower. From an elevated, static perspective, she produced close-up, wide, and high-angle compositions: a series of obsessive and luminous portraits, where the subject possessed the artist almost as much as she possessed it. The concrete has a weight to it, a roughness. Glass and drapery are composed in transparent layers. The night doesn’t so much as erase things, but soften their appearance. The last work from this period, shown in the exhibition, Ombre [Shadow], is a downward-sweeping view submerged in a golden fog that softens the surrounding severity — the fixed gaze dissolves into the blur. Since then, Sze To moved out. She now lives inside Paris itself, on the ground floor. This change had a big impact on her work. Her practice no longer comes from an enduring, knowing gaze, but from her urban wanderings, taking photos with her telephone. This banal, of-its-time gesture, when brought into the studio, is transformed by handiwork that seems to come from an ancient era. The source images are placed one after the other — using a “joiners” method that recalls Hockney — provoking subtle distortions in perspective. This technique for evading a single vanishing point—a frozen moment seen by a single eye—resonates with Chinese painting, a tradition that informs Sze To’s practice, through filiation, displacing Western classical perspective through the privileging of a mobile rather than static gaze, the viewer invited to pass through the image. The passers-by that populate her canvases actually exist. But she allows herself to accelerate their crossings, taking the liberty to put them on the same canvas, orchestrating encounters that the street’s rhythm didn’t produce. Oil paint, a material that the artist had put aside to work with pastel and watercolour, requires a different approach. Everything begins from a precise intention: seizing the decisive focal point. But across the process, other points of focus emerge, unanticipated, equally as important as the first: a lamp post, the neon light of a shop display, a faint presence behind a window’s light. Her method is also defined by a simple painterly gesture: she mixes a colour on her palette, applies it to the intended part of the canvas, and then lets it ricochet elsewhere in the composition, spontaneously at first, then more and more consciously, seeking a rhythm between colours and forms, as though it were music. Each subject—a place, people, an object—is for her both a fragment and an image reduced to the entirety of its contents, as though the world were repeated on every scale; the brushstrokes themselves, minuscule gestures repeated millions of times on the canvas, materialise the relationship between the global and the particular. When in front of the Pont de Sully [Sully Bridge], the artist sought to paint the vertigo of one single thing within this immensity, the peacefulness of its harmony. The river’s slight convex shape pushed her to invent a sky that responded to it. The concentric circles of a stone thrown in the water are found elsewhere in the round lightbulbs of a lighting store’s display; in tree trunks, the sculpted posts of a wardrobe, or the battlements of a tower. These are still portraits. A wardrobe’s open doors reveal folders of paperwork, a shop window displays a multiplicity of lamps, an apartment block, a bridge — these are our objects, our buildings, the world made by men, that continue to signify them in their absence. The clock of a station is reflected, and deformed, in a neighbouring façade. The city seems to reply to itself. The exhibition once had another title: Bulles [Bubbles]. Sze To liked its transparency: a film that lets the light in, filtered and decomposed, becoming tangible in the more colourful canvases in the series. Even as a child, she was told that she lived in a bubble. Echos implies an outside: something that reverberates, transformed; rather than space closed-off on itself. What painting can do, according to Sze To, is to imbue matter with something language cannot attain – this space between us and the world. Each subject, even a still life, becomes a way of searching for what we have in common. In the most silent work in the exhibition, two lightbulbs rest on a fragment of white fabric, turned off. All light in the series — street lights, neons, windows, reflections — seems to have withdrawn into itself, waiting. An echo, just before it drifts away.