Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza: à rebours / Nathalie Talec: Vingt mille jours sur terre

Two solo exhibits presented at the Frac Franche-Comté will honor women artists whose work is featured in its collections. As indicated in their titles, both touch upon the question of time, a problematic at the heart of the Frac Franch-Comté’s artistic project since 2006.

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza: à rebours (backwards)
à rebours presents work by Ecuadorian artist Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza whose oeuvre is built around notions of memory and forgetting, apparition and disappearance. It is the fruit of a troubling manipulation of time and attempts to invert its progression. The exhibition the Frac devotes to her echoes work she designed in the framework of a public commission for Chalezeule, a town situated near Besançon. 

à rebours notably assembles a piece acquired by the Frac (preface to a cartography of an imagined country, 2010) and an impressive installation the artist began in 2009 called untitled (extras), as well as the video countdown (2005–13). 

untitled (extras) is composed of newspaper whereupon the artist has rubbed out shapes—those of extras in the media scene who are, by nature, neither subject or object. Only a ghost-like shape remains on the page, their auras. Nearby, numbered flasks with a clinical esthetic contain residue or precipitation of each of her erasures, seemingly the very essence of these beings lacking consistency. They build a community, a moving crowd of anonyms. Here the artist waxes paradoxical, giving the extras an identity, be it digital: by erasing images of these humans “on the fringe” our eye barely glances, Estefanía hollowly resupplies them with body. By making them disappear she reveals them.

Nathalie Talec: Vingt mille jours sur terre (Twenty thousand days on earth)
Vingt mille jours sur terre offers us a sample of Nathalie Talec’s work she initiated over 30 years ago, an incredibly hybrid body of work whose common denominators include the artist’s obsession with cold, snow and perception. The artist selects her references from art, the kitsch and the decorative, exploring varied forms such as painting, photography, sculpture, decorative objects, video, installation and performance.

Vingt mille jours sur terre extends this affirmation of multiplicity to its marked influences inside the art space: therefore a “classical” scenography found in the first rooms—assembling bisque porcelain sculptures produced in the workshops of the Sevres Manufacture, a “monumental” installation in neon, painting and watercolors, decorative objects, sculptures…—is counteracted by an “agitated” space where the artist revisits her work from its origins and shows the sedimentation at work all along through a profusion of reproductions, drawings, objects, notes, sketches, video, performances: a room intended to portray the image of the artist’s brain and her studio at once, there where research and concepts arise, there where the work is brought about via practice and experimentation.

Curator: Sylvie Zavatta, director of the Frac

The Frac Franche-Comté regional contemporary art fund is one of the 23 Frac created in 1982 to disseminate contemporary art within each region of France. The Frac have three complementary missions: to collect the art of our times, to take it out into the public, and to educate people about art. The Frac Franche-Comté builds and manages a public collection of contemporary art assembling 598 works by 303 artists. Since 2006 the collection has focused on works investigating the broad question of time, this issue being a perennial theme in art history, as well as a topical concern, rooted in the region’s history. Since 2011, within this collection of works exploring the notion of time, the Frac has sought to develop an area devoted to so-called “sound” works.