Artists

Martine Bedin

Press release

Even the cat believes it. Such was the title of the first work in this series of watercolours on natural linen paper, before the exhibition titled La part des choses presented the continuation. A trompe-l’œil even for a cat? It is known that a cat’s field of vision spans 260 degrees, giving it a panoramic view of its environment.

At 7 rue de Beaune: six paintings. A long, detailed shot of the objects on the artist’s table. The watercolour captures things with no possible way back. Porcelain bowls from Japan, a traditional coffee cup from Warsaw, a cup picked up on rue du Jacob, a mass-distribution dishrack. There is something of a self-portrait in this depiction of rather disparate items of crockery. Objects stocked at the back of a cupboard and which only come to life when needed. A life spent partly in the shadows and partly in light. In part silent and in part shrill. The object slowly takes shape on a plain surface, and its shadow turns just like the time being given on a sundial. Each hour is exact. Each shadow unveils a little of the object’s truth. But the more this truth is unveiled, the more an object, which can be quite familiar, seems to be part of a different reality.

At 5 rue de Beaune: two standing mirrors, which painted parts can be rotated entirely, echo the rotation/revolution of shadows in the paintings. These are also “reflections of objects placed on the table, in front, at night, with no or almost no shadows, shadows of an American night, nocturnal, artificial lighting, with a lemon-yellow blaze,” writes the artist. These objects/paintings evoke pell-mell Spanish still-lifes, Renaissance vanitas globes, astrolabes from ancient collections, the velvet of Visconti films, fairytales, images that stay in the mind with the authority of memories. 

Martine Bedin has been drawing objects ever since she started out as a designer with Memphis - objects to change the world, objects “which, like viruses, infiltrated neat bourgeois interiors, to make the domestic order sicken.”(1) Objects still fascinate her. But, found in everyday life, already there, scrutinised by the artist who tips them into another dimension. 

Another animal then comes to mind, after a cat playing with its shadow and that of other things – which we like to think it takes for real objects. An octopus. According to Vinciane Despret in Autobiographie d’un poulpe et autres récits d’anticipation, for octopuses the projection of ink, long interpreted as a screen to blur the vision of its adversaries, is in fact analogous to an image, allowing them to produce an appearance of themselves, like a shadow.

Faire la part des choses or “making allowances” means finding the happy medium between two situations, or two divergent opinions… Martine Bedin here offers a voyage between reality and fiction — one that projects a shadow or an anamorphic reflection. 



(1) Objets nos amis, une conversation, Martine Bedin, Claude Eveno, 2019.