Caroline Veith

Mirror game Caroline Veith Contemporary drawing figurative art humour

2022

The painter-engraver Caroline Veith was born in Le Havre in 1958. In 1982, she received her diploma at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art (ENSAAMA). Caroline Veith’s work takes us to the heart of a ‘mechanical universe’, inhabited by busy beings, caught in the excitement of an unpredictable world. In this urban jungle, each being is taking part in a mad race, absurd or amusing. Provided that each can exist, if possible, alone or colliding with the others? Everything is floating on the labyrinthine designs in which the artist attempts to untangle the thread of existence, armed with a thick coat of layers. It is a battle between the Great Order and the Small Disorder. Who will win? THE IMMENSE MARQUETRY OF REALITY (EXTRACT) Today, Caroline Veith has developed a genuinely unusual manner of bringing together various aspects of the world. Certain paintings, mostly in small size, portray the interactions between two or three people, and larger ones portray larger groups of people. In both cases, each person is close to the other while living in a lonely world. It is as if you are looking through the paper into the scene. The use of tracing paper lets the light reveal new layers that otherwise would have stayed invisible. The power of the paper is in its resistance of everything, from the passing of time to the sudden and violent human gestures. One can and one must scratch, dig, bend, twist and unfold the paper, and one must do all this in order to finally liberate the breath of life it holds in custody. The paper is the garment of dreams. The new method of working on tracing paper gives the works a limitless scale. Most often, there is no colour, but a network of thick, varied lines in different inks, expressing diverse functions: to form a face, indicate direction, grow a flower, carve a hand, cover a memory, draw a fragment of a map, extract a detail of a memory, drown another in darkness, raise an articulated arm, constrain a force to stay still, saturate the space, hand a weapon at the end of all hope, open a road, move a mountain, bury the pain. Through the game of ‘invisible’ surfaces on which the various elements that compose the work live, Caroline Veith makes her line the vector of trouble. This gives her creation a magical power. JEAN-LOUIS POITEVIN – WRITER, ART CRITIC