Catherine Oulanier and Manon Damiens invest the chapel of the Pénitents Bleus with their works which respond to each other. Sculptures and graphic productions which reflect their interest in movement and their way of keeping track of it without freezing it in space. Laetitia Escalier and the Art’Zygote association will come and mingle with graphic interlacings in dance performances on Sundays, October 13 and November 24 at 4 p.m.
10 years ago, Catherine Oulanier was already exhibiting at Pénitents Bleus; 10 years ago, Manon Damiens put down her suitcases as a cinema or theater scenographer to settle in Narbonne as a sculptor. The two artists met and, during the opening, we could see how their works work together, without accident or chance intervening in their creations.
Catherine Oulanier works with mixtures of oil and inks on paper which she then mounts on wood. “Movement and color bring me joy” she confides. Her paintings express as much as they represent. The viewer cannot be passive and can only interpret her moving characters, her evocations of spaces: fields, woods, cliffs or houses. In her fifties of the works she exhibits, a high proportion present, characters who are, unmistakably, in action, in movement, crowd, groups or kinetic decomposition, it is up to the viewer to choose.
Manon Damiens, if she also materializes the trace of movement, she does so in three dimensions in creations where elegance materializes in precise simple lines associated with rigor. Waves, fields in the wind as well as determined and yet empty spaces, shadows as important as what generates them: Manon Damiens’ sculptures are animated, sometimes even sound. A “forest”, created for the event, is installed in the center of the chapel. It allows the public to be immersed in this dialogue between the two artists. It will also host dance performances by Laetitia Escalier on Sundays October 13 and November 24 at 4 p.m.
Yves Penet will point out, during his presentation, the gentleness and quality of the poetic dialogue of these artists in a world, at the moment, brutal. We leave this exhibition amazed at the mastery these artists have of their techniques which, by fixing the trace of the natural or human motive, always manage to express its movement.