Sandrine Raquin

Sandrine Raquin was born in 1965 in Paray-Le-Monial (FR), she lives and works in Marseille (FR)

At the heart of Sandrine Raquin’s work lies a story of place, a conflict of topologies whose disjunction, constantly nourishing her gaze, highlights displacements and imprecisions. Sandrine Raquin organizes a parallel reading of world maps through a play of transparency and superimposition. On a chart showing global drug consumption, the artist inscribes “still expecting an outcome.” She uses graphs and planispheres as databases that enable a reinterpretation of things through the juxtaposition and detour of aphorisms. Her comments, imbued with the slightly worn solemnity of proverbs, gently or with deep cynicism mark the human condition. But more than that, throughout these map variations, the artist points to a topological refuge, the intellectual space of technical, normative and comparative imposition. It becomes the standard by which we look at the world, all the more so because it structures supposed pathways to reality in perfect tautology with its own laws of measurement and development.

Charts abound. Yet the remarks are not limited to mere irony. They speak of another place, the very one that maps eventually reduce to abstract data. The proximity of certain words can be unsettling. On a political level, in the broadest sense of the term, our mediated society reflects a prolonged process of distancing and disengagement. One might then speak of a lack of maturity concerning words like hope, sentimental, honesty, disillusionment. Through the playful trappings of Sandrine Raquin’s works — beyond the direct confrontation with the vulgarity through which we increasingly uphold untenable and absurdly fragmented readings of society — emerges the question of a grown-up language. To what reality must each of our demands yield? What is lost in entering the adult realm of speech?

Observation alone is not enough. Opposing one structure to another is still submitting to its rule, still excusing the act of blindness. Sandrine Raquin is careful not to compartmentalize her work. The subject must not replace the process of reflection. Maps and diagrams serve as pretexts, as tools that, through a rhetoric of detour, highlight individual richness. The artist prefers to speak of flow, of imprecision, of malleability. She privileges the arrow over the point, the direction over the place, doubt over certainty.

Gradually, the linear apprehension of space that echoed the schematic imposition of statistics gives way to detachment, to a reading of events through layering. The maps are painted or engraved on Plexiglas and mounted on transparent bases whose edges outline regions. This detachment is also a conceptual figure, a principle that the artist immerses in her mental space — a willingness to allow room, to give objects the chance to transform, to weave connections among themselves. Escaping confinement becomes the possible horizon of her practice by seeking a symbolic autonomy for objects. The superposition of spaces reflects conflicts of topology, those places from which different forms of language and possibilities of understanding the world are structured, hence the doubt that Sandrine Raquin establishes as a paradigm.

She also creates a fluid and unpredictable reading space, since the eye is no longer confined to the plane or the single direction of the diagram. One can see through. Sandrine Raquin continues this notion of detachment through arrows and captions placed on paintings of clouds. This gesture underscores the deeper movements of dissemination, the capacity of things — and particularly their meanings — to shift, to anticipate, and to act against expectations. The turbulence of the cumulonimbus becomes metaphorically a powerful image of the imagination: it functions only in flux, with no possible notion of territory.

Thus Sandrine Raquin explores the density of subjective space through statistical imagery. If no lines of demarcation can be drawn, then progress must occur through constant return, a kind of territory to be repeatedly crosshatched in order to test the paths of one’s own movement (“minutes of silence”). The making of each work determines a time of projection toward future pieces. Each work finds its freedom within the field of another. This interdependence between her view of events, of herself, of others, and of her own work reveals the urgency of maintaining a position of honesty — without which the artist would fall into the very pitfalls she exposes.

— Text by Frédéric Brice, 2003

Sandrine Raquin’s work in on display during the exhibition Pierre Albert, Maria Teresa Alves, Gilles Barbier, Jimmie Durham, Florence Farrugia, Francesco Finizio, Anne Lacour, Claire Maugeais, Jean-Christophe Nourisson, Sandrine Raquin, 1997, Quality Street, 1998, Trabendo, 2003 and Pop-up, 2014.