Duo drawing
Like freeze-frames, Pauline Martinet and Zoé Texereau's strange, uninhabited dwellings, drawn by four hands on large sheets of paper with graphite pencil, are fascinating in more ways than one. Firstly, their extraordinary graphic mastery, made all the more impressive by the fact that the two artists share this mastery to the point of exchanging plates as they work. Secondly, their mastery of narrative, as these deserted alleys, gardens and terraces, closed facades and garage doors, obstructed windows and wall sections hemmed in with well-trimmed flowerbeds enclosing disquieting cast shadows are all fictional cuts offered up to the imagination... Places that resemble ghostly sets or truncated sequence shots, inhabited by absence and frozen in a suspended time where anything is possible, where anything can be envisaged.
Caught in the trap of their closed field and unsettling frontality, the eye, deceived by the meticulousness of the line and the almost photographic perfection of the rendering of materials and the play of light and shadow, plunges into the great silence of these screen images to reconstitute the cinematographic puzzle made up of these elliptical and scattered scenes. Born in 1987 and 1986 respectively, Pauline Martinet and Zoé Texereau have been working as a duo since they met at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in 2008. Recipients of the Pierre David-Weill Drawing Prize in 2020, they have been in residence at the Drawing Factory in Paris (2021), as well as in Los Angeles (2017) and Norway (2014). They live and work in Paris. Pauline Martinet and Zoé Texereau have recently embarked on a new medium, textiles, enabling them to transpose their black-and-white universe into colorful quilts (or patchworks) of brightly colored fabrics.
You can discover their creations on their account
Instagram: martinettexereau
By Stéphanie Dulout
