A walk in Frédérique Lucien’s winter garden

PARIS — Exhibition of Frédérique Lucien Winter Garden at Galerie Jean Fournier talks about his ongoing engagement with the sculptural representation of the body (most often his own) and the malleable forms of the botanical world. Lucien generally operates at the intersection of painting, drawing and sculpture, and this installation offers examples of all of them. A winter Garden is a conservatory – an orangery, greenhouse or conservatory – a place that allows plants to grow out of season and out of their normal context. In this exhibition, Lucien draws the outlines of delicate and complicated natural forms – intertwining flowers, pods, stems and leaves.

These shapes are then cut from sheets of aluminum, brass or copper – their dimensionality is flattened and the overlapping parts are fused together. The use of metal transforms the abstract immateriality of a design into something with a different sort of presence and physicality – a flat, rigid form that can be wall mounted individually or in groups, set on the floor and leaned against him, or hanging in line at a bar. The negative space of the cutout can also be used, with the remaining metal rectangle framing an image of the plant form on a white wall. (The rectangle is often raised slightly off the wall so that a thin line of dark shadow from the plant becomes another figurative element.) Pushing against the delicacy of the cut metal works are large, brash collage paintings of these same flat, scaled forms painted and executed with black, white and metallic paints, complemented by a series of small flat-patterned, brightly colored cut-out gouaches that use similar plant motifs.

Lucien’s body sculptures operate as a counterpoint to his two-dimensional botanical work. As with leaves and flowers, body images are also removed from their normal context, both in form and display. Lucien takes isolated elements of his body – an elbow, knee, foot or lips – and molds them in porcelain, with matte or glossy surfaces in a range of colors, from natural skin tones to pure white, jet black , yellow or gold. Another distancing strategy beyond truncation and color manipulation is scale. The porcelain firing process shrinks the forms, imbuing these objects with a doll-like strangeness. This strangeness is accentuated by their mode of presentation, arranged on small wall shelves like at “Courbure”. (2022), fixed directly to the wall, as for “Bocca” (2022), or spread out, like meat, in a large-scale wood pantry, or food storage bin, as with “Cellar” (2022). Sometimes the body part is easily identifiable, for example a foot; but other times, as with “Courbure”, the shape, in this case an elbow, seems completely abstract and Brancusi-like.

Lucien’s work is considerably more subversive than it first appears. She takes natural things that are ignored or paid little attention to and brings them into focus – cutting them, cutting them, flattening them, enlarging them or shrinking them. This heightened act of observation, the creation of an abstract visual grammar of types, makes the objects in question both insistent and elusive, engaging them in a continuous but ambiguous act of translation.

Frederique Lucien: Winter Garden continues at the Galerie Jean Fournier (22 rue du Bac, 75007 Paris) until July 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.