Drawing in pairs
Like freeze-frames, the strange, uninhabited dwellings drawn collaboratively in graphite on large sheets of paper by Pauline Martinet and Zoé Texereau are fascinating for several reasons. First, their extraordinary graphic mastery, all the more impressive because the two artists share it to the point of exchanging work-in-progress sketches… Second, their mastery of storytelling, for these deserted paths, gardens, and terraces, these facades and closed garage doors, these boarded-up windows, and these sections of wall edged with neatly trimmed hedges that frame unsettling shadows are all fictional cuts offered to the imagination… Places resembling ghost sets or truncated sequence shots, inhabited by absence and seemingly frozen in a suspended time where everything becomes possible, where everything can be considered.
Trapped by their enclosed space and unsettling frontality, the eye, deceived by the meticulous detail and the almost photographic perfection of the rendering of textures and the interplay of light and shadow, plunges into the profound silence of these screen-images to reconstruct the cinematic puzzle composed of these elliptical and scattered scenes. Born in 1987 and 1986 respectively, Pauline Martinet and Zoé Texereau work in duo since meeting at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in 2008. Recipients of the Pierre David-Weill drawing prize in 2020, they have been artists-in-residence at the Drawing Factory in Paris (2021), as well as in Los Angeles (2017) and in Norway (2014). They live and work in Paris. Pauline Martinet and Zoé Texereau have recently begun practicing a new medium, textiles, which allows for the colorized transposition of their black and white drawn universe into quilts (or patchworks) of brightly colored fabrics.
You can discover their creations on their account
Instagram: Martinettexereau
By Stéphanie Dulout
