Josée Pitteloud
Born in 1952
Lives and works in Geneva
Josée Pitteloud produces very few works and does so on a long-term basis. Each of her alkyd-based paintings takes years to complete, over the course of lengthy and winding explorations. She has gradually developed a process that would bring to mind that of artists associated with conceptual art if it were not so deeply rooted in matter, in the vibration of colours and their potential for suggestion. In fact, this process almost resembles a ritual: at first there is no project; just a colour and a starting date that give their names to the work, such as Vert de phtalocyanine 11 XII 13 (Phtalocyanine Green 11 XII 13, 2015) or Cadmium citron 14 IV 98 (Cadmium Lemon 14 IV 98, 2007). With her canvas lain horizontally, she adds successive layers of colour, which sometimes spread out onto the entire surface, revealing organic shapes, tears, plays on transparency and infinite depths. The painting is what leads the dance, what guides the hand. The artist likes to take risks, even if it means reassessing everything and destroying the delicate balance of coloured tones that she has sometimes built over a decade. All of this occurs until finally the piece “works”, when it finally has a top and a bottom, takes hold of the space it occupies, after fifty or so strata.
The room where Josée Pitteloud works is free from any distractions; its walls are white and the atmosphere meditative. She does however bring her own sensations of nature to this space outside of time and everyday chaos. The canvases that stem from this process of repetition and restarting offer themselves to the eye as landscapes would: changing and elusive, they open up our field of perception. While the motif as a subject is absent from her alkyd-based paintings, it does, however, appear in other works that the artist creates when she leaves the city for the mountains. In her drawings on paper – which she showed for the first time in 2022 –, one also finds the same intense focus on the moment of creation and interest in optical effects. The interlacing motifs border on abstraction and become ornamental.
Exaltation of slowness, persistence, to the point of resilience: key words that do not sit well with our time and yet describe a practice that is deeply rooted in the present, in constant search for new experiences.
Texte by Nolwenn Mégard
Translated by Lucy Pons