In the corner of your mind

Imagine that you were to give form, all in one place, to the fragments of ideas that you cherish, the ones that inhabit a certain part of your brain. Not the ideas that feed into conversations in daily life, but rather those that hide in the corners of your mind, that you may only rarely have had the opportunity to say out loud, your dreams, your fantasies, your curiosity about other worlds and other populations.

Oneiric experience

It is this highly oneiric experience that we sense on entering the exhibition of Tatiana Trouvé (born in 1968) at the Centre Pompidou. The Italian artist who lives in France and grew up in Africa has created a magical and mysterious world, one that is hard to fathom, from which we may re-emerge dumbfounded without elucidating what it contains. The 800m2 of this total art installation is composed primarily of markings on the floor.

Cards to understand life

Tatiana Trouvé explains to us that these are different maps that she became aware of over the course of her readings. “When you become interested in cartography you find new ways of understanding life. On the floor I have reproduced diagrams that superimpose over each other, for example a map from the Warlpiri aboriginal people which gives as much importance to dreams as reality, and the olfactory maps that wolves make when they use their excrement to delineate their territory.”

I like to lose myself

But above all the room has been transformed into a labyrinth of images thanks to huge drawings with mysterious lines that hang from the ceiling at different heights. In short these are paintings that float in the open space of the museum. For some time Tatiana Trouvé has been drawing on very large-scale surfaces up to 4 metres in length. “On a large scale I like to lose myself more.” She takes pieces of coloured paper, the surface of which she first attacks with bleach.

Trance

She then describes her activity like a sort of trance. Images emerge from the different markings completed by her pencil. “My idea was to create a sense of disorientation,” she explains. It resembles depictions of film scenes with the characters taken out. I have already written a report on her sculptures exhibited at the Villa Medici (See here).

During the pandemic

A large wall at the entrance to her room at the Centre Pompidou shows the series that was made daily by Tatiana Trouvé during the 2020 lockdown in France (see also the subject I dedicated to her drawings chronicling the pandemic). “Every day I selected the front pages of the free newspapers in the countries most affected by the pandemic. I printed them out and then I painted or drew on them. They are workshop pieces, records of an era.”

This exhibition, which is beautifully titled “Grand atlas de la disorientation” (The Great Atlas of Disorientation), is like a world in itself.

Until 22 August. Le grand atlas de la désorientation. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/