The Christophe Gaillard Gallery is delighted to present Promenade avec Jean-Sébastien, the Polishartist Kassia Knap’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Following her show at the Fine Art Museum of Lille and later as part of l’Art dans les Chapelles, she tookpart in the exhibition «Ainsi soit-il – Collection Antoine de Galbert» at the Fine Art Museum of Lyon.
There are many connections with the music of Bach in Kassia Knap’s canvases. Above and beyond the artist’s love for the musician, the latter’s principles of polyphonies surely refer to the former’s polysemy of the fold. Likewise, emanating from these works is a sovereign beauty that communicates its power through the diffuse feeling we get for its construction. Structuring is not the least of the qualities shown in Kassia Knap’s work, work whose the architectonic strength we can feel, as with the composer or with Flamboyant Gothic buildings with their fasciculated pillars, lierne ribs and tiercerons (like so many folds in her canvases). One might say, paraphrasing Nicolas Meeus: «If the ear could hear, in the background to the fundamental structure and in the succession of musical movements in the foreground, as deeply and as far as the eye, in the case of an image or a building, follows and sums up the lines in all their directions, extents and relations, it ought to have (...) the feeling of a gigantic construction in which many long and wonderful lines, seemingly experiencing nothing but their own mystery, bring about profoundly significant and powerful relationships.» This exhibition in which the laborious, the everyday, gravity on the one hand, combines with the spiritual and grace on the other could equally well have been given the title «Gravity and Grace» had it not already been used for the recent show at the Collège des Bernardins curated by Eric de Chassey.
To mark the association of works by Kassia Knap with works by Philippe de Champaigne at Lille, Régis Cotentin wrote, «Kassia Knap is blazing a trail of her own in contemporary painting. These visions are at the confluence of several pictorial traditions: the drape and the icon, which are the most obvious aspect of her inspiration, and more quietly, the tradition that is generally called the «philosophy of the fold», with permanent references to Leibniz and Deleuze. For both these philosophers, and for Barthes as well, the fold is also, to quote the latter’s expression, «an inclination of the soul», the fold is an indivisible substance and yet one undergoing perpetual transformation. (...) In the chapter on «The Interlace – The Chasm», Merleau-Ponty shows how thought is a «sublimation of the flesh» and how there is therefore something like a thought from the moment of perception that directs or organizes it. In this case, it seems legitimate to think that man is at the origin of the spectacle of the world, and constitutes or deploys it. In her relationship to the canvas, Kassia Knap reinforces this idea. The support absorbs all the impressions and sensations that are powerful experiences for the artist when walking around in nature. In her practice, the artist replaces the concept for that of the experience, and this change is far from being merely anecdotal in contemporary art, since it means that her body, whereby and through which she experiences the world, is not cast off onto the side of the objective expanse orexteriority. It is what now takes over what was previously attributed to subjectivity, although without taking over its every feature, being itself a «piece of the world». (...) If the notion of flesh appears in Kassia Knap’s oeuvre, as the keystone of her artistic work, it also raises the question of embodiment: to say that the world has flesh or that there is such a thing as the flesh of the visible, amounts to preventing oneself from getting outside of phenomenality, or stepping outside of the perceptible. But the intelligible is itself based and constructed on the perceptible. The flesh concept points to the transfer of Knap’s impressions as she converts her perception of the world into folds. Her art, starting out from the notion of flesh, is no longer made up of aesthetic inquiry; it becomes much more radical: «All that remains is to look for what the world is, and the truth, and being, in terms of the complicity we have with them.»