Exposition Polyphonie du noir

Translation of André Lamarre’s text on Béatrice Sokoloff

 

As an artist Béatrice Sokoloff strives to bring to life a surface and explore its texture. She does so through an array of techniques that include: copper engraving, etching, drypoint, aquatint, lithography, and collography. The key to her practice lies in the use of reversibility, that is to say, some of the especially intricate engravings appear to constitute a trellis of black lines and forms on a white background, yet at the same time one can perceive them as flashes, slivers, or shafts of light bursting through an elaborate black lattice. Such ambiguity creates the dynamics intrinsic to this art of filling space.

Sokoloff’s method boils down to constant experimentation with lines and shapes, black and white (some colour zones also crop up), so that it resembles tracery. Her creations may go by symbolic or exotic names such as Amazonie and Jardin, but they do not primarily represent nature, nor images from her travels. Rather, they focus on the tension between chaos and the frame, infinity and its scission by spatial parameters. Although her works certainly bear the marks of proliferous vegetation (stems, branches, leaves), they also exhibit signs of animate architecture (blood, vessels, bodily organs, physiological networks) as well as traces of life preserved in the earth’s crust (fissures, strata, fossils). Her engravings thus parallel those natural processes that put their stamp on organic and inorganic matter. In fact Sokoloff’s iconography similarly results from a rigorous adaptation of her actions (incise, engrave, repeat) to the materials she employs (tools, plates, metals, ink).

ANDRÉ LAMARRE

Translated by Professor Norman Cornett