Pierre RESTANY Catalog, public order, June 29, 1990. |
All of Françoise Catalàa's arrangements are thus part of an evolving style of the absence /presence dialectical model: dissemination of modular forms, different repetition and at last a final stage of relative stability which would be akin to a stasis of deconstruction. A great wealth of interactive messages is conveyed through this circuit which, beyond Derrida and Deleuze, leads to the fractal fatality of the identical, Françoise Catalàa, that's all... |
|
.Françoise
Catalàa is not content to polarize the space with a sculpture
in the traditional sense: she organizes paths for the gaze and also
for the body. The purity, the monumentality, the poetic force of his creations touch me all the more because under their rigorous geometry circulates and vibrates an abundance of themes that are dear to me: myths, enigmatic messages from forgotten languages and scriptures, essential forms of nature, among others. A complex symbolism offers itself to our decipherment in these monuments which sometimes cut through space like the crystals of some unknown mineral system, sometimes haunt it like the ruins of a forgotten civilization. |
François-Bernard MÂCHE Exhibition catalog March 1988. |
|
Madanjeet SINGH Special Advisor to the Managing Directorof UNESCO, responsible for issues of Culture and Education, Blanc-Mesnil PATH to PEACEcatalog, Paris, July 28, 1994 |
All this,
and Heaven too, is reflected in the fascinating artistic works of Françoise
Catalàa, which effectively demonstrate how cultures, across all
of humanity, in places of the world so radically separated, converge,
transcending both time and space, and continually manifest themselves
in their wholeness of form and content. It is this “passage”,
a phenomenon of ultimate and cosmogonic universality of different cultures,
which is the leitmotif and the “vital foundation” of the
natural symbols in the artistic creations of Françoise Catalàa… |
|
“Your
book is superb, overflowing with richness. Sculpture is for me one of
the most difficult registers: it requires a slow, absorbed meditation,
entering the thickness. I have only written twice about works of sculpture
(Etienne Martin and Lucile Bertrand). Your production is moreover itself
very broad, very varied through its constants of which gravity or rather
weighing is a major one. Which doesn't mean lightness: it means gravity.
Maybe we will have the opportunity to talk about it…” |
Jean-Luc NANCY Philosopher and writer Emeritus Professor at the University of Strasbourg (letter of March 28, 2008). |
|
Jean-Louis
VIEILLARD-BARON |
Like Bergson, Françoise
Catalàa unites objective expression and inner life. It is not
surprising that it has found, in the superpositions of duration with
itself, in the interpenetration of states of consciousness into each
other, the expression of the metamorphosis which is the law of creative
evolution (…). That visual art can become an art of time, this is what Cataláa shows by realizing in each of his works, a journey, that is to say a real spiritual pathing(…) …That time is deposited on the fabric in letters signifying the most immediate numerical sequence, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7, this is what Françoise Catalàa understood (…) Written fabrics of Cataláa bear the mark of this profound humanism which is nothing other than the feeling of human unity. The deposition of time is the living deposit of creative time in the individual consciousness; the exposure of time is its effective realization and its expansion into the moving universe. |
|
Contrary, indeed, to this modernity
too often claimed as a vast site of disenchantment with the world, this
work, familiar with the most 'archaic' cultures as well as the most
current and most delirious mathematics, attentive to the sound of rhombs
as to those of the computers of Xenakis or Mâche, never ceases
to celebrate, in the vertigo of creating, the reconciliation of scientific
knowledge and the mystery of spiritualities... This work is a journey
with infinite correspondences. |
Gérard BARRIÈRE Art critic and philosopher |
|
| Jacques LACARRIERE Writer. Catalog Incantare Blanc-Mesnil 1990. |
.From threshold
to threshold, edge and horizon merge. They are the reinvented space
of Stonehenge where mistletoe and star pickers sleep. You have to enter
through the door of the palimpsests to discover the virgin soil of words
and dream in the motionless maelstrom of time. |
|
|
Encrypted chaos «The fall bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerron ntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!»...The hundred-letter words to say the storm associated with the fall: the components of the decomposition of the terms saying the thunder in more than twenty different languages, Joyce invents the origin of language and languages at the same time. Two combined myths, that of the origin and that of Babel in a single big telluric word. In a comparable gesture, Françoise Catalàa continues this movement by which creation is back to chaos, but to the chaos of cipher words. The lightning is born from the meeting between the softness and the roar, the material of the fabric, tender for the eye and soft under the fingers and the nature of the noise, shattering for the ear, power of danger. Is this encounter provoked by the fallen words of an obscure disaster, or is it what gives birth to them, both ordered and confused? The power of the work is to decide nothing about it. Will more than five thousand languages say the storm enough, the fear that we continue to have of it because we think we are dying from what we obscurely came from? |
Tiphaine
SAMOYAULT was a professor of general and comparative literature at Paris 8 Sorbonne Nouvelle Universities. Director of Studies at EHESS since 2021, Director of the Arts Research Center and language (CRAL-EHESS/CNRS). Lightning Book 2011 . |
|
Nathalie DARZAC |
In harmonic sequences, cosmological
and poetic meditation, Françoise Catalàa practices the
alchemical fusion of black, white and red in an irreducible quest for
ultimate reality, the absolute. Always on the edge of limit states,
this work extirpates, in a body-to-body matter-spirit, the essence of
being. Organized according to an initiatory journey that guides to the
fiery heart of the most vibrant, the most luminous “Art of Love”,
the artist’s installations create a magical place where space-time
flourishes in its entirety. |
|
| First of all, it is
an impression of silence, of timeless calm, of a sumptuous presence,
still concealed, of a heavy and motionless beauty. A rustle of time over, a murmur of silenced voices, then a muffled music, serious, deep, tenacious, voluptuously distressing rises. Few hear. Few deserve this hidden offering, these secret memories, this finally almost accessible serenity. |
Jacques LABARTHE-PON Catalog. Fine Arts Department of the Dordogne1987. |
|
| Laurent DEVEZE Philosopher Catalog of Catalàa exhibition, French Institute Krakow Poland 1993 |
Happiness
of a pathing that once again one would think sung. While around the
visitor weaves the soft fabric of a complicity. A universe, perhaps
a language, better a word, we are in the presence of a rare work. |
|
The
Path to Peace in Blanc-Mesnil is undoubtedly a beautiful work of art
that Françoise Catalàa created with great enthusiasm,
love and poetry. The artist has indeed been able to convey through the
Arrow, the Three Gates of Peace and the Memorial, the deep feeling of
the coexistence between entities, symbols and historical facts, which
are rarely brought together and presented to the public of simultaneously.
The artist thus demonstrates ‘urban creation’. His work
reflects better than any work of urban planner, what establishes the
foundation of the city, that is to say this skilful mixture of individuals
of diverse origins, belonging to varied cultures but pursuing a goal
common. |
Cynthia
GHORRA-GOBIN Urban planner, Research Director at the CNRS Professor at the Institute of Political Studies Paris Catalog Path to Peace September 1994. . |
|
| .Pierre
RESTANY Art critic. Catalog Path to Peace September 1994 |
This analysis underlines the
semantic richness and the structural precision of this work. (…)
The internal logic that unites each element of the system is highly
significant: more than a remodeling, an architectural staging or an
urban planning operation,' the 'Tribute to Peace' is a living and 'speaking'
work, the humanist expression of the 'soul' of a community. It is a
brilliant exercise in Cataláa style where the author testifies,
without pretense, to the mastery of his means and the fullness of his
language. |
|
Between
the zero of vacuity, the one of singularity (this is how astrophysicists
designate the initial moment of the universe) and the eight of accomplished
infinity, it will be a question here of what Heraclitus called the Game
of the World, or the Being-in-Becoming-of-the-Totality. Extensive program,
of course. But seeing the works of Françoise Catalàa (…),
one quickly realizes that, accustomed to the monumental and the universal,
this artist is not the type to be discouraged by the distance or the
extent of the horizons that she proposes to her step. Françoise
Catalàa's work, like her spirit and her teaching, is essentially
encyclopaedic, universalist, humanist and mystical. riddles, memory
and imagination, in an adventure of the mind where your dreams will
go to meet those of the whole world and of all ages. (…) Don’t
go visit, go live, go on a trip… |
Gérard BARRIÈRE Art critic and philosopher Catalog ‘Austral’ Courtieux gallery, Suresnes, near Paris, November 3, 1995. |
|
| Pierre RESTANY Art critic Catalog Incantare July 15, 1990. |
Objects,
sculptures, pathings of Françoise Catalàa are naturally
incantatory. All is said and all is to be said at the same time. Dissemination,
deconstruction, fractalization, different repetition, the ‘CATALÁANE’
creation reaches its normality in the permanent and continuous present
of its affective and sensitive consciousness. (…) An order, a
silence, an inner harmony should emerge from the whole, free the spectator-actor
from the selfish burdens of everyday life and put him on the path to
peace of heart... |
|
Sculpture? Maquette? Model?
Architectural element? Urbanism? Since defining her work is so problematic,
since she refuses to be locked into a precise and delimited genre, Françoise
Catalàa can’t leave you indifferent. On the occasion of
the French institute of South Africa, this french woman – a sculptor,
a designer of space – exhibits at our neighbours, Newtown Galleries
of Johannesburg. Artist at the margins of the main contemporary art trends, Françoise Catalàa is interested in the symbolic dimension of mythical and ritual forms of all civilizations, and integrates them in contemporary sculpture. The results of this quest are often monumental works constituting roads of initiation. (…) |
A woman,
a sculptor, an architect, an urbanist P15 Wolhuter mail n°1 IFAS South Africa 1995. |
|
. Ricky BURNETT |
The
re-invigoration of public space, thr enrichment of shared man-made urban
environments is, I believe as crucial for our future social health as
is the provision of housing and sewerage. (…) Architectural inventiveness
dedicated to the revision of urban landscapes is one of the great, yet
rarely faced, challenges present in the developing world. Françoise Catalàa who is both an architect and a sculptor, has explored this interface for many years (…) Our thanks to Françoise Catalàa for her energy and commitment. We are delighted to be hosting this exhibition (…) |
|
Françoise
Catalàa is a visual artist, teacher at the School of Architecture
of Paris - Villemin. (…) The educational approaches of Françoise
Catalàa had caught our attention by the place they granted to
non-Western plastics, calling on the considerable corpus of arts that
were once described as 'primitive', attributed to societies that were
said ‘traditional', as opposed to our 'modern-developed' societies.
This approach, to our knowledge not very common in the plastic teachings
delivered in schools of architecture, could only intrigue the anthropologists
of our network (…) A work of art structuring a public space is
one of the constituent dimensions of the urban art that Françoise
Catalàa offers us (…) Her personal approach, in which a
dialogue is established with the cultures furthest removed, in the first
analysis, from our 'modernity', (…) nevertheless directly joins
the most lively and the most burning of the daily life of a Parisian
suburb: the identity and the cultural membership of each one, to recognize
and to find (…) |
Christelle
ROBIN |
|
Claude
PARENT
|
(…) I
admit that I needed this second reading because at first I was disturbed
by the incredible diversity of your works. But the drawings gave me
the key, the common thread of all this (sacred) investigative monumentality.
(…) the drawings of sculptors are often better than those of painters. I love 'Epectasis', 'Racine d'un carré' and 'Amaterasu' and I am overwhelmed by the fabrics '…and the winner is…'. (…) it is true that I find a relationship with my oblique requirement in many of your works. With my complicit friendships |
|
| .“(…)
I wanted to tell you that your work touched me a lot. (…) I really think that you have taken another step in your work. You have found a completely different vocabulary, and a very interesting concept. The only thing I regret is that Pierre Restany couldn't see it, but I'm sure he would have liked it very much and would have encouraged you. |
Dani
KARAVAN |
Cédric VILLANI |
|
(...) I really appreciate your
works (...) |
| ‘‘I
was overwhelmed by your creative work. I found it quite extraordinary’ |
Ezra SULEIMAN
ProfessorPrinceton USA, Master of Arts |
Jacques POUCHEPADASS |
|
« I can warmly congratulate
you for the honor bestowed on you, the gaze of others makes you aware
of yourself, and such public recognition necessarily helps you move
forward, especially creators like you who draw so much from themselves!
» |
| "I
was moved by your beautiful book [...] with my admiration. » |
Georges
APERGHIS |
|
| Patrice HUGUES |
'Your
hard work impresses me. Your sense of a certain form of perfection and
also of monumentality...’ |
|
| “I
am delighted for all these distinctions for you.” |
Catherine
TASCA |