Sasha Ferré

On the occasion of the exhibition 'Daughter of Earth and Water', Almine Rech Brussels in partnership with Beaux Arts group, organized a talk between Barbara Vanderlinden, art historian and curator, and Sasha Ferré.

The following excerpt is taken from a private exchange between Sasha Ferré and Barbara Vanderlinden, held in preparation for the talk.

BARBARA VANDERLINDEN: Pierre Wat described your process as one of “passing through,” the body becoming porous and fluid. Do you see your body as a conduit or a co-creator in the act of painting?

SASHA FERRÉ: My body is very active when I paint. The linen canvas is unrolled on the studio floor. I crouch, I turn around the painting. I move above it, and sometimes slip underneath to reach the middle of the canvas. My practice is intensely physical. It is quite exhausting. I use all the strength and flexibility of the body to make the work. Often we think that our creativity is sitting in our heads in our brains. Dance taught me that your whole body is intelligent, sentient and creative. 
I notice the interplay of different agencies, human, material, terrestrial (gravity for example) engaging in the process. 
That being said, I am definitely porous to everything that surrounds me, mood, relations, encounters, air quality, pollution, pollen, conflicts, affects. 
And that’s why thinking about  the making of the atmosphere is important to me. 

BV: To what extent are emptiness and erasure as important as gesture and presence in your process? How do you negotiate that balance between construction and disappearance?

SF: The notion of emptiness is interesting here. Are my paintings empty? We often think that when there’s no human presence figurated, then it means that the space is empty. I’d like to ask the question: what kind of presence are my paintings actually displaying? 
Then about erasure. The painting emerges through the process of composing a structure and stroking it several times. Because the material is wet and viscous the erasing becomes a material metamorphosis, a mixture (E. Coccia). 
This gesture is evocative of E. Glissant's idea of Creolization. Creolization emphasizes the unpredictability of the outcome and the emergence of genuinely novel forms and identities. It's a process of creation that doesn't just combine elements but produces something different. It is radically different from “collage” for example, where things don’t actually blend but remain juxtaposed with clear delineations. 
Erasing in painting means mark making. Shaping space. Erasing is a generative act. It reminds me of minority histories and women's histories being erased. 
The gesture is also the trace of a presence. Like in the Pech Merle caves. Every artist- whether a graffiti artist or a prehistoric artist- at one point made a mark on a surface as a way to attest to a presence at a moment in time. It is an existential metaphysical gesture. It says I am here, I'm alive. It’s an anticipation of your own death. Some could argue that if we didn’t have consciousness of our own death, art wouldn’t be necessary.  

BV: What role does sensuality or tactility play in how your paintings evolve?

SF: As I described in my process, I work exclusively with my hands. I don’t use brushes, so tactility is central to the way I approach painting. The wax pigments are very sensual. They melt when touched and as a result the colours mix together and generate surprising new hues and shapes.
I’m guided by touch when I paint. The painting emerges through these stroking rhythmic hand movements. There is no source image to work from. No photograph, no sketching. It is a leap into the unknown. Levinas talks about touch as “une marche à l’invisible”. I don’t really see the big picture when I paint. I discover it only when we hang it onto the wall. It's the Haptic force that drives me more than the optic.

BV: What is the political dimension of tactility in your work—can touch function as a form of resistance?

SF: We live in a postCovid world where touch is increasingly associated with illness and danger. People spend more time touching screens than touching other bodies, other skins. 
I associate touch with notions of Intimacy, Opacity (E. Glissant), Tenderness (O. Tokarczuk) and the Erotic (A. Lorde) in a sort of continuum. These concepts operate as important modes of relating and connecting humans and nonhumans together. But also as empowering forces, “power to”, an increase in our capacity to act and create, instead of “power over”, wanting to control others bodies and nature. 
To me painting is a practice of sensual embodied re-attunement. 
It is a modality of resistance against the prevalence of vision and transparency, surveillance and ultimately all forms of domination.

BV: Do you see your paintings as invitations to slow perception—a kind of contemplative space?

SF: To me painting offers a respite from the turmoil of the world. Opening a space outside of words and language.
A break from the “cacophony of soloists” (O. Tokarczuk).
Space for silence. Space for breathing. A place where we suspend meaning for a moment.

BV: How do you balance abstraction with layered concepts such as toxicity, collectivity, and climate without becoming illustrative?

SF: Painting is like writing or talking, it is a way to think things through. To address a problem.
I see those concepts as a theoretical underlayer of questions. That’s the underpainting in a way. 
Like a body or rather a metabody, a painting is composed of different materialities. These concepts are what preoccupy me, along with more intimate feelings, when I enter the studio. They condition the becoming of the paintings. My studio practice is informed by my thinking and my changing emotional state about these contemporary issues and theories. 
My way of addressing those questions is not through representation. 

BV: How might abstraction become a form of care, resistance, or even healing in times of crisis?

SF: In a world saturated with noise, conflict and loneliness, I don’t want to make work that would add more noise, brutality and division. In fact this body of work is intentionally less loud than the previous ones. Colours are slightly muted or deeper, gestures are softer. 
My paintings are an embodied practice of sensuous re-attunement and synchronous breathing. Perhaps even symbiotic breathing, the idea of breathing with (humans and animals) and breathing from (plants).
For Olga Tokarczuk, "existential tender attunement" is an aesthetic position that sensitizes others to the beauty and complexity of the post-anthropocentric world.
"Tenderness is a deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time."
“Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.”
I’d like my paintings to have a similar effect as a collective tender embrace inviting synchronous breathing. 

Sasha Ferré is a visual artist working and living in Paris. She has exhibited in the US, Japan and Europe and is the recipient of the Hine Painting Prize in 2020. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (London) and a BA in Art History from La Sorbonne University (Paris). Her paintings respond to nature not by seeking to depict it but by letting it be felt. The artist lives in the gap between landscapes and abstraction, where she unfolds a world of foliage, waves, flames and corals that we can no longer see but would once more need to touch.