10 May 2012

Marie-Jeanne Hoffner at Galerie Dohyang Lee, Paris

Double Game

Basing itself on actual spaces and territories and borrowing their systems of standardized representation such as maps, patterns and cartography, the often site-specific work of Marie-Jeanne Hoffner – including drawings, installations, videos, photographs, models, etc. – broadens these perspectives while maintaining subtle tensions between construction and deconstruction, folding and unfolding, surface and volume, fullness and emptiness.

We encounter photograms in which the overlapping of strips of graph paper evokes a chaotic urbanism and, through a negative saturation, creates disturbing zones of white light that capture our attention. We come across small pieces of balsa wood frontally presented on a wooden support that make up the fragments of a latent assembled structure. Elsewhere, we see elements like strips of wood drawn in marker that compose the frail skeletons of architectures yet to be. Or are they perhaps already reduced to a state of ruins? Meanwhile, the moving image of the video echoes the model, whose 'modulations' allow us – through displacement, addition and subtraction – to view the setting from different angles.

Flirting with abstraction, constructivism or perhaps even a form of surrealism, the forms and games of (de)construction employed or suggested by Marie-Jeanne Hoffner project us into constructed – or yet to be constructed – spaces located in an in-between, an intermediate phase caught between assembling and disassembling. It's this very interval, this other 'game', that gives these concrete spaces transcended by the artist their full scope all while renewing our perception of them. Within this sensitive and changing zone new configurations come about, unfurling and unfolding, to be read – and explored – between the lines.

Anne-Lou Vicente, April 2012