Isabelle Ferreira

Isabelle Ferreira was born in 1972, she lives and works in Paris (FR)

Where I must paint, I write a rectangle of the size I want, which plays, for me, the role of an open window through which to view historia.
Leon Battista Alberti – De Pictura (1435).

Isabelle Ferreira’s artistic production is based on the history and practice of disciplines traditionally separated, namely painting and sculpture, both interconnected with architecture. She implements an interdisciplinary approach through a practice where the arts of combination, color, and measurement interact. A complementarity she utilizes within pictorial units that are minimal and modular in principle. These constructions blur the boundary between sculpture and painting, as the artist works to shift this boundary and offer possible redefinitions.

Leon Battista Alberti considered the painting as a window open to the world. Based on this observation, Isabelle Ferreira has chosen to step over the frame in order to examine the porosities that exist between flatness and spatiality. To do this, she draws from the fundamental repertoires of each discipline in order to question and challenge them. She focuses particularly on volume, surface, and the interdependence of matter with the design of space. Their respective essences intertwine, interrogate each other, and ultimately open up to a broader reflection on the representation and perception of the world. Through her abstract landscapes, she creates a resonance between volume and surface. An heir to historical movements such as the Bauhaus and Minimalism—two movements that understood material and color in both an empirical and sensitive manner—she pursues, in the background, a guiding principle: stretching painting towards sculpture and stepping out of the frame to freely engage with space. Each piece nourishes a broader reflection on the history of painting, its present, and its future. While she explores depth, point of view, movement, rhythm, and density, Isabelle Ferreira is not a painter in the classical sense. Rather, she grants herself a transversal status by embedding fundamental pictorial issues into her practice: composition, surface, color, light, and perspective.

Since 2006, the artist has engaged in a dialogue with the space she occupies. To do this, she works with three elements: material, color, and place. Three principles she combines within pictorial devices that contaminate, compose, and rhythm the space. The materials selected are industrially produced. They are serial, raw, intended for construction, and serve a specific function: plaster bricks, wooden slats, copper tubes, plastics, plywood panels, and acrylic paint. The colors are vivid and varied. The paint is applied with a brush or spray paint, covering one or several facets of the bricks, the outside of a wooden chest, or the full length of the slats. Because they do not appear systematically, the different hues not only rhythm the modules but also the entire space. A colorful and material musicality is revealed. The artist adapts to the architecture of the place, both interior and exterior, integrating materials specific to the buildings, their proportions, environment, possibilities, and constraints. She confronts the scale of the place by occupying the walls or floor, while generating an interaction between the interior and exterior spaces. This dialogue is made possible by the implementation of harmonious material extensions that offer infinite possibilities. She invites the viewer to a physical, visual, and sensory confrontation with her constructions. Each of them requires an active participation from the public to appreciate and discover the multiplicity of viewpoints and conceptual scope.

Text by Julie Crenn
Translation: Triangle-Astérides

Isabelle Ferreira’s work in on display during the exhibition Après avoir tout oublié [After having forgotten everything], 2015.