Pariétales
Agnès Thurnauer

Writing and painting began with figures. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ? any number of possible numbers combining at the fingertips. On Sumerian tablets, the reed pen impressed into fresh clay the first recorded accounts that became accounts recorded: tales fixed in earth matter for posterity, ledgers of legends. These days, the nib of the reed is a stylus or the pads of our fingers. Agnès Thurnauer?s Tablettes initiate a new dialogue with language. They are paintings and they are signs signalling to us. We recognise an orange E, a green L, emerging from the white of the canvas: an alphabet implied by negative space. Letters at heart, they resonate with the Matrices sculptures and the Correspondances avec Matisse. Their contours drawn by coloured lines on the paper cut out shaped paintings in colour and open up the planar to the spatial. The Figures detach from the rectangle of the painting, whirling and spinning on the wall. They invite the wall?s whiteness to become a centrifugal force and our bodies to move around it ? 7, 8, the rhythm overbrims the vowels and composes a score like a dance traced by the paintbrush. ?I am a prehistoric painter,? says the artist. Her pictorial language performs archaic gestures, unfurling pieces of earth, of sky, of flesh that curl up in the space. Here, we find her in conversation as much with Richard Tuttle as with Giotto, whose angel unrolls the heavens of the Scrovegni Chapel, revealing their red underside: a piece of wall, a monochromatic hue, a fragment of painted surface, a scroll. Her Danse likewise cleaves the word in two. In the work of Agnès Thurnauer, language spools out on an infinite loop