The “La rencontre des eaux” exhibition is a composite landscape where the reliefs and the colours are defined by the hybrid artworks of Jot Fau and Margot Pietri. These creations are fragments of stories of different times merging for the first time in favour of intuition: beyond formal differences, they are two universes made of the same clay.

Narration is the source of their respective practices. From her first pieces to the most recent ones, the idea of “story telling” is essential to Jot Fau. At first solely personal, these stories then started to encompass the ones around her and ended up circling towards something more universal. Invariably, the artist questions our identities and more precisely “what makes us”. According to her, one of the elements constituting ourselves is language. Multilingual, Jot Fau handles words with precision in order to create titles we often find blended in her artwork. They are compasses orientating us as much as they are losing us. The same goes for Margot Pietri. The titles of her artworks are, for some, of the digital, temporal, meteorological terminology, reasoning with emojis, special characters of even grids engraved and drawn on objects. These characters allusively echo the autofictions she lies down on the keyboard, used as a foundation for her work. This does not imply the verb is disconnected from the hand. The hand is another foundation for their art.

Whether being textile work for Jot Fau or metal for Margot Pietri, the hand is constantly sought: the hand harvests, grabs and assembles. Self-taught in artisanal sewing and stitching techniques for one, in metal work for the other, both invent new ways of working, going against the idea of speed. This empirical approach leads to unexpected results and allows them to be in a perpetual state of research, in accordance with new findings.

Most of the material they find are scraps taken and left at the workshop. Even if they are used and imperfect, the pieces of leather and fabric are used to protect the artefacts covered by Jot Fau, where Margot Pietri stretches steel clippings to create simplified shapes. These reuses, initially motivated by money savings, have become an ecologic and symbolic concern: artistic creation is a synonym of transformation and reparation. The treatment of raw material comes with a specific treatment of colours.

Margot Pietri coats her supports with jesmonite, a gypsum-based material in an acrylic resin mixed with pigments resulting in opaque or transparent layers of reworked substance, occasionally oozing, from black to white, with touches of yellows, blues and purples. The shades sometimes carry an emotional charge, interacting with the symbols running across the stelae. For Jot Fau, it is about patiently looking for the harmony and accuracy of the fabric shades associated with wood and photography.

Margot Pietri’s sculptures-paintings are instinctively fixated to the gallery or layed directly on the floor. The same goes for the Jot Fau’s supple creations that can be held up or layed on a structure. The exposition context is what determines the stature. In the end, contemplating “La rencontre des eaux” is to dive with modesty in the two artists’ intimacy. We are overwhelmed with a feeling of reverence when facing the fragments of a civilization we cannot pinpoint through time, so close and yet so far

Exhibition text | Joris Thomas