Stéphanie Malossane is a French artist who stretches time, making it porous. She develops her work around its cyclical dimension and thus softens our conception of it. Faces, events and patterns appear intermittently according to various conditions. For example, her phosphorescent moons change their appearance at nightfall. This tide’s tidal logic, characterized by the round trip, serves as a guideline for us to understand his Rings series.With her Rings series, Stéphanie Malossane combines several approaches to time. We rediscover its perpetual aspect with the manifestation of a new beginning. As such, the wooden logs that sometimes serve as supports for Malossane’s cyanotypes are edifying. Their rings are repeated in rings, witnesses of the seasons, markers of the climate symbolizing the years. Each year is singular, with its particularities, but obeys an identical cycle.
Among these cycles that punctuate our existence we find the alternation of day and night. However, the artist comes here to blur it in order to reveal other temporal conceptions. The use of the cyanotype, a photographic technique that gives a bluish – Prussian blue – to the images, transfigures the subjects. This treatment makes the representations more dreamlike and prevents us from determining whether the scenes are day or night. The spectator plunges into a temporality with blurred contours, typical of dreams, a zone where the mind navigates without anchors and where it can easily come and go, or even loop back and forth on a given event.
When the artist, through photography, shows a past event, it opens the present to memories and brings out the feeling of reminiscence. The action cannot therefore be situated in a fixed and precisely organized past, since by recalling it we allow it to take place in our present. In the Rings series, it was necessary to show how memory works on our representation of time. The tree is at the same time the place where the bird nests, takes flight and settles, it aggregates in itself several memories. Nevertheless, we already see it sawed, showing its rings, which evoke the idea of a cycle. Thus, to a certain extent, past, present and future overlap. The same work superimposes distinct events.
Stéphanie Malossane evokes superimposition through the use of veils and overlays. The artist’s work is part of an aorist approach to time. The action represented is accomplished but one cannot say when, only the gesture matters. The bird can “land, fly, land” on the tree, without there being any order to be restored. Only the action counts. Things take place and engender each other in free associations. In doing so, the artist sees time in what is fortuitous. The bird at the end of its flight lands, does it return to the tree where it was born? Unless it is the branch where it will nest tomorrow… coincidences and synchronicities that denote a relationship to time once again renewed, articulating itself around the encounter.
Boris Marotte, Art critic