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Testimonials

2011: Ten paintings by Eliane Saheurs

Maureen Korp, Ph.D.

In more than a few respects, artist Eliane Saheurs’ recent paintings are like a traveller’s treks into high mountains. Sometimes we can see far, clear across the valleys, even so far as the next mountain ridge. More often, as we pick our way along the path, we watch where we are going.

The path is slippery. We make our way with hand and foot. Little rocks go tumbling. Then, clearing the forest, straight ahead, at last the promised resting point comes into sight. We can sit down, look out, take in the view, have a snack, and talk about what we are doing, what we have seen, and where we are going.

Eliane Saheurs is Swiss-born. Rocks, mountains, and the scarlet lights of sun on rock are colours and shapes she knows well. The artist has photographed and painted these forms from a complex point-of-view–one as much scientific as mystic–for more than thirty years.

Use of aerial perspective

In her paintings, Eliane Saheurs often uses an aerial perspective to pull the viewer into the scene. In Susten, for example, the composition’s straight dark lines are broken in a frothing, icy white vortex. Looking straight ahead and above the tumult, the viewer confronts a worse possibility. An abyss--bleak, dark, and wintry.

Interestingly, Susten’s shapes, colours, and compositional tensions are allied to those the artist also uses in Hidden Structures XXI. If the two paintings are seen side-by-side, the viewer realizes Hidden Structures XXI depicts the critical moment before all hell breaks loose, and Susten the aftermath.

Hidden Structures XV, on the other hand, suggests the detritus at end-of-day, a twilight of benign possibilities. Were it possible to imagine beach toys, candy wrappers, mussel shells, lost towels, jellyfish, fishing nets, and bathing suit bits blowing about in the ocean’s wind, then a hundred years of Coney Island might look like Eliane Saheurs’ Hidden Structures XV.

Miró’s influence

A few intriguing comparisons might be made between the work of Spanish artist Joan Miró (1893-1983) and Eliane Saheurs. For starters, both artists play with time in similar ways in their compositions.

In the early 1920s, Miró undertook a series of landscapes depicting time seen, and time unseen. Although the artist retained the horizon line of present day in his landscapes, in the shadows, we find overlooked narratives from yesterday and from today–both outside in and inside out. For example, in Miró’s Farmhouse, 1921-2, the house is being built, and demolished right before us; and, in Ploughed Earth, Montroig (1923-4), Miró’s landscape includes the yawping postures of bull, horse, farmer’s dog and duck, plus a chicken or two. As well, an ear to hear and an eye to see may be found among the painting’s many wonders.

In her paintings, Eliane Saheurs also asks the viewer to reach back into memory–not just to lived, present-day memories of the 21st century, but further–as far back as cellular memory of bone and Pleistocene rock.

In the lower left of Saheurs’ painting Hidden Structures XXIII, for example, we might see, momentarily, the blues and greens of a deep glacial lake. Straight ahead, however, we lose the horizon in an infinite expanse of white. On the right, a sudden eruption of yellows, greens, bits of red and purple. What is all this wild activity ? Does it make any noise? The viewer can only imagine.

Use of diagonal

Saheurs sometimes employs a diagonal motion in her compositions. Miró did so, too, but rarely. Miró preferred a contemplative grid. The two thin diagonal lines of his Motherhood, 1924, for example, are counterposed lines of stasis. Saheurs, however, employs the diagonal as an active, kinetic force.

In three of her recent paintings--Albite, Bellinzona, and Ilimenau–we see blues and purples pushing pinks and oranges across the composition. In two other recent paintings, Hidden Structures XVI and Hidden Structures XXIV, the artist tumbles airborne objects--some falling, some flying--across the picture plane and along a diagonal.

Becoming aware of any diagonal movement somewhere off the edge of peripheral vision always turns the viewer’s head around. The wind is ruffling the trees.

Here is where the mountain’s path is bending.

Hidden Structures I is remarkable work. Blue and orange dance above the plane. An orchestra of strings and bows in vibrant yellows and reds plays out along the bottom edge. The painting’s composition keeps the viewer in the centre of the action while unfolding layer upon layer, possibility upon possibility, in a light calligraphic hand. A synthesis of sound and colour appears within reach. Here is the multivalent painting upon which the artist’s next series of work can be built.

In conclusion...

The story of painting is more than that of a particular time, place, or artist. Our ancestors knew, when they used ochre to paint story upon rock; the colour itself–often mouth-sprayed upon rock--was infused with the breath of the artist. These colours are the very same favoured by artist Eliane Saheurs’ in her work today.

When we attend to an artist’s work, following line, colour, and shape, we slow down our breathing, focus distracted attention, and enter into, as Eliane Saheurs writes, a “...hidden world of emerging and submerging structures and shapes.” What could be better? We collapse time. For a moment, we have suspended mortality.

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"Eliane Saheurs - Consummate Artist, whose work is inspired by earth's evolution and forms has a new exhibition at Galerie d'art Jean-Claude Bergeron.... allowed her to work much larger and with richer layers of colours and textures...."

Susan Hallett, The Epoch Time, March 12, 2010, B2 Arts and Culture

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"....many of her paintings appear to be completely abstract at first glance, a closer inspection reveals that an exploration of the geological goings-on of planet Earth is in the works - striations of rock are layered upon one another, revealing billions of years of activity. This is painting that makes you think of how small and insignificant humans really are...."

Melanie Scott, Interiors, premier issue 2004

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"...ses paysages rocailleux ... les textures de froissement deviennent comme une peau sur la froideur de la roche. Le mariage des techniques de gravure fait bon ménage et ajoute une richesse tactile...."

Dominique Laurent, Le Droit, 1998

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"...although the paintings have a highly structured formal balance, the viewer is aware of the body strength and gestures it takes to get the sweep of paint, the upward force in Eruption or the aqueous drift of matter in Sedimentation...
The one constant in her work is her use of collage, her layering. This buildup, the sense that everything carries its own imbedded history....
... her forte is the big statement. In the painting Sedimentation, Saheurs evokes a calm sense of power, of tactility, of an intimation of the physical laws of the universe that govern the evolution and devolution of matter through a parallel sense of process."

Nancy Baele, The Citizen, 1994