Introduction

The Irresistible Synthetic

Audrey Matt Aubert's artistic practice is essentially based on a reflection on architecture and the forms it produces. If her painting focuses more particularly on the exploration of the motifs that characterize certain large ensembles (following a treatment often close to abstraction), drawing allows her to introduce a more phantasmagorical dimension, influenced as much by surrealism as by the reading of theories on the generic city and the development of large modern metropolises.

For her recent drawings, the artist has drawn from the most ancient civilizations a corpus of archaic forms and theriomorphic habitats, to which she does not hesitate to add, by collage and contagion, the systematism and rigour of the most contemporary constructions. By submitting these architectures to the principles of a rhizomic and modular development, which she borrows from the animal and vegetable worlds, Audrey Matt-Aubert succeeds in substituting the alveolus to the standardized elements of construction, to reveal the unexpected kinship which links the shape of a honeycomb to our contemporary housing. Elsewhere, an exotic composition, populated with indistinct palmaceae, comes to interfere in the interstices of a precarious structure, which is as much a monument as an attraction. Through this manipulations, Audrey Matt Aubert manages to reconcile the regimes of the metaphorical and the literal , at the expense of a striking hybridization and a simultaneous movement from the artificial to the organic and from the living to the synthetic.

Strange architectural chimeras then rise up, and deposited under the limpid clarity of a distant desert or plunged into the dull darkness of an opaque night, impose on us like the scenery and protagonists of an universal history : the phantasm of the city without history, an irresistible synthesis of all the other ones and destined for eternity to limitless growth and constraint.

Thibault Bissirier, 2017.


Audrey Matt Aubert was born in 1990 (FR). She lives in Les Lilas and works at the Ateliers du Houloc in Aubervilliers.

Graduated from Ensba Paris - Atelier Dominique Gauthier (2015).