Capitulo 5 - em breve, solo exhibition at Base, Lisbon

OR...or...

What came first? The work or the artist? The gallery or the work? The artist or the gallery?

Sandrine Llouquet would probably answer OR. This or that, two paths that have their own paths and lead us to different perspectives on the drifts of art and artistic poesis. The path that is carved out to reach the work is made up of pieces. These are what make up the narrative and the body of her works. Mixed, transformed, rethought, and manipulated, they take on a shape and history. They are pieces with a life of their own that sometimes fall asleep and can suddenly wake up and be utilized in a moment of rationality by the artist. As the contemporary philosopher Gilbert Simondon said, being is not exhausted in the individual; it overflows. For Sandrine, the artist is just another part of the work, full of incompleteness that the viewer - the potential energy - will fill in.

The very title of the exhibition refers to an "unfinished work." Capitulo 5 - em breve (Chapter 5 – upcoming) points to previous chapters written by the artist and to others that will emerge: "is finishing not finished." Sandrine's artistic corpus should be analyzed as if it were a book. We know that it began with the first chapter, but we do not know, including the artist, when it will end, that is, if this artistic corpus book will have a conclusion or even final considerations. We can see that the exhibition is full of thought, and that thought needs something to produce its lines, rhizomes, and new paths. In Sandrine's case, these lines-rhizomes-paths come from the poetic encounter with mystery.

Furthermore, this is only desirable as a way of escaping to something unexplained and not as a conclusion/unraveling or discovery of something. Mystery here functions as an awakener that confronts the multiplicities of the self and distances itself from the simple retentions of mere memory reproduction. For the artist, mystery immerses her in materials relating to a wide range of objects, colors, and sounds, and in her living unconscious: the tables with the various pieces on display are a living unconscious. An unconscious that is not what is not conscious but what goes beyond consciousness: infinite multiplicity full of dimensions. They are the active being in the work's becoming, where everything that exists is related to what 19th-century French philosopher Maine de Biran called the primitive fact of intimate meaning: the "ego" or center of indeterminacy for Bergson.

Let us be open to this primitive, intimate sense that Sandrine presents us in this exhibition. We will possibly be able to see in it an authentic cabinet of curiosities where a doll with a tail, bought in Bali, OR a skull of a saber-toothed tiger brought from Tokyo, are parts of a larger narrative that the artist wants to permanently rethink in a relationship with the one who observes them: the viewer.

Pedro Arrifano