INK ON PAPER

” “There is more in this world than that which our standard practice considers to be the reality. There is the subjunctive, the realm of possibility. And to convey this to us, that’what poetry is for”

Alexander Kluge, 2022

Ink on paper : two supposedly simple materials which suffice for Emilie Cognard […] to enable the poetry of possibility to become visible in its loveliest form. For the artist, the individual line is the nucleus from which complex pictorial worlds mature. […] Emilie Cognard follows intuitively her first stroke, which immediately runs again as it is bathed in water, searches for its own shape and thereby char- acterises the world that Cognard brings to light on the paper. She describes it thus : “The lines and their progressions guide the entire progress of the work “. A complex universe gradually unfolds on the paper that brings to light one of the numerous possibilities which the empty sheet of paper had already kept on hand the whole time as an option.

“The drawn stroke is an act of opening onto an elsewhere, an attempt to discover the tucked-away, to let the invisible become visible in the moment when my hand withdraws”.

Emilie Cognard allows complex and opulent pictorial worlds to arise from a sim- ple line, here intuitively systematically following the apparent traces; […] She not only formulates the subjunctive but she elaborates on it and make the realms of possibility visible. Hidden inside is, not least, a substantial amount of provocation with which observers can justifiably fell to have been challenged. For, when one individual stroke already contains all these countless possibilities, which realities would then be truly liveable, if we were decide in favour of them ? “

Artnow Gallery, April 2022 Text by : Felix Brosius