Armelle Caron: A Tidier World
Armelle Caron is a Frech artist that attended Art School in Avignone (école supérieure d’art d’Avignon) and the university of Lanchaster. She is a passionate traveler and this fact has conditioned her in her artistic path and in the use of maps in many of her artworks.
Les Villes Rangees/Tidy Cities
One of her most famous series is Les Villes Rangees. The artist takes the plan of a city and deconstructs it in its urban units, which become autonomous and independent forms. Then sort them according to different criteria, such as shape and size, putting them in tidy rows. The artist uses scientific methods such as dissection and cataloging applied to the artistic world to create her works.
It all began when Armelle Caron, moved to Berlin, decided to better understand the layout of the city, which turned out to be nothing more than a set of geometric forms. She decided to take the Berlin map and submit it to two abstraction processes. The first was the removal of any type of road signs from the map and made it completely monochrome. The second was the breakdown of each urban unit and the subsequent cataloging. She then decided to apply these processes to various other cities.
Les Villes en Creux/Quarry Towns
Another project that focuses on city maps is Les Villes en Creux. One of the purposes of this work is the creation of a travel diary. The cities visited by the artist are accompanied by a short text that describes the feelings felt during the trip. All of the spaces left empty by Caron on the map are then filled and animated by the memories of the city. The process of creating these works is defined by the artist as a sort of personal archaeology. She digs into her memories of the journey to recall them in her work.
Monotonous litany of bingo numbers, openwork throws
Blackpool 2002
rush into the brown sea. Many people on the promenade,
all ages, we laugh and eat with beautiful teeth. Huge
Italian-style ice cream and fish and ships. At night,
the city becomes ghost; kitch illuminations bloated in the
storm. Las Vegas smells like French fries.
“Buildings as low as the sky. On the skin of black water from
Cork 2009
peat of the canal, small pale green leaves float,
punctuation. Soup and black bread from the covered market are
sweet and creamy. A man plays the piano in the hubbub.
Sam carries Elma on his stomach. Smiles in the corner.”
Borges Nous L’avait Dit/Borges told us so
An installation created by the artist in a square of Montpellier is inspired by Borges, a figure that fascinates very much Caron. It is interesting what Armelle Caron says in an interview about the relationship between Borges and her work: “[…] You remember Borges’ text The Cartographer. It’s roughly the story of a man who wanted to represent the world with such precision that he covered this world with a map in scale 1. It’s a very strong image, which for me has marked a lot. I believe that in my work this question of scale is very much present. In front of the maps we are colossal, but in front of the landscapes we are very small pixels. It is by extension a relation of the body in the world that I imagine.”
In this installation the artist creates a topography in scale 1, where the observer is immersed in the work of art as in the landscape.
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Featured Image: Bruxelles Rangée by Armelle Caron
