A new exhibition of Anne Sauzey’s work at the Librairie Benoît Forgeot, 

5-13 October 2018 

When I tear paper I need to see the white inside, she says.

Her words resonate as I take in this new exhibition. There are planes of whiteness in some pieces, as if it has run out of the torn heart of the paper, particularly in her landscapes. She has made fields and hills, paths and a tilted sky, or is that what they are? There is no reduction to a single reading here, the eye shifts from any known place back to process, bits of coloured paper and sometimes gauze stuck together but not too neatly, pastel crayon drawn against it but not straight.

There is such wholeness in what she has done, says a woman.

Is it out of a past when one was removed unwillingly from one landscape and grafted to another, that one comes to this need to stick what had been torn together again and find a new wholeness? No hope of peaceful repose, though, there are scratches, staples, tiny rough holes pushed through the paper as if anxiety had been hunting there and dug its claws in.

But then how has she found such precarious balance, such beauty, this language closer to music than to words – an edge of music where song might break out at any moment, as if from a great distance. There is so much space inside even her smallest frames, fragments expanding against each other in the mind as one turns away.

Now she has chosen to work in the round space of a vinyl record label, the textured sheen of the needle-thin grooves turning as one shifts slightly to one side or the other, entering the space she has made there. Some could be landscapes, or telescoped stretches of imagination; or are they soundscapes, rather, strips of movement stolen from the mouth of a saxophone, the broken heat of a snare drum, phrases of colour poised in the silence after the melody has been announced, on the steep slope that plunges into improvisation? 

From the minute concentric ripples of the vinyl, my eye moves to some of the bigger pieces where she has chosen to work with blackness. These are what pull me most strongly, the night of them, where the white pith of the torn edges is almost invisible, though the panelling of paper is not. Could one slide some of it back and enter? Black against blackness yields other possibilities, as in the upper planes of one space where a discrete red geometry advances out of the pitch dark, one more delineation of the new height in her work. 

Denis Hirson