ARBORIS is a wall composition, a totem of 70 cm wide and 210 cm high, made of 72 elements mixing copper matrixes and prints on paper.
All 72 elements have been assembled and stuck on 3 to 4cm deep cleats screwed into a black painted and varnished wooden panel.
Artist: Fanny Boucher
Title: Arboris
Size: 70 x 210 cm
Support: Cuivre et papier Awagami Mingeishi bleu nuit
Year: 2020
Trophy: Master of Art and winners of the Liliane Bettencourt, “L’intelligence de la Main” Award.
The tree is like a bridge between the earth and the celestial, it leads us to raise our heads towards the sky. As for its roots, they seem to be those of the universe, the matrix of the world.
When I was a child, I promised myself that one day I would climb a tree to listen to the clouds.
A few decades later, Rabindranath Tagore’s verses reminded me: «With the trees, the earth tries to speak to the sky that listens».
To me, the tree is a universal symbol of otherness. A model. In front of a tree, each person sees a different reality according to what one is deep down. For me, its roots are those of the world.
It is the matrix of it….
The word tree originates from the Latin “arbor”, a singular feminine name, arboris as a plural. It was associated with Mother Earth, the one who bears fruits. It became masculine when it was translated into French, as did almost all the names of trees.
In this work, the reflections of the copper matrixes, their shimmer and luminosity interact with the darkness and depth of the dark blue papers.
72 unique and independent photogravures which, when combined, become a powerful piece of art…
“A strange wish of universal weave” as Paul Valery wrote in his Dialogue of the tree.
A bridge between the earth and celestial worlds.
Just like the tree, Arboris seems to overlook us with all its majesty.
This work is for me the culmination of 20 years spent trying to recognize the power and independence of the rotogravure matrix, its otherness.
It comes from a process of affirmation and contemporaneity, of questioning the origin of my know-how and its evolution. It is intended as a manifesto to open rotogravure to other fields, to offer it other horizons than that of prints and multiple prints, to show that our ancestral know-how certainly makes us pastors, but that it is our duty to enrich them with our history and our dreams, and to inscribe them durably in our present and our future.
