Eva Jospin

Since her successful first solo exhibition at Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve in 2015, Éva Jospin has been invited to create work—typically, monumental installations—across France: at the Louvreʼs Cour Carrée, the Domaine de Trévarez, in Chaumont-sur-Loire, at Beaupassage in Paris, at the Landscape and Architecture Biennial in Versailles, and at Voyage, an exhibition of public sculpture, in Nantes. Each work she creates, whether ephemeral or permanent, is impressive. Panoramas of dense, mysterious forests, grottos consecrated to nymphs, covered in overgrown vegetation and rocks, form timeless worlds in which the artist enjoys “playing with materiality, with representation and illusion,” she explains.

For her second solo exhibition at Suzanne Tarasieve, Jospin once again gave free reign to her abundant imagination. On a group of islets appear composite architectures and building materials, deeply connected to the landscape, to the earth, and to nature, rooted in the process and era in which they appeared and flourished, in this corner of the world in which bridges span unseen streams or crevasses.

It embodies Jospinʼs reveries. Both a model and a sculpture in itself, each component combines the real elements of an existing architecture with a reinvented, fictional vision of a palace, a temple, or a garden and its different components (a grotto, a gazebo, a promontory, a rockery) designed as a pleasure garden. A self-contained world, where stories, tales, epics, myths can crystallize. “I studied mannerist Renaissance gardens and landscape paintings,” recalled Jospin. In her representation, or reinterpretation, of idealized nature, she reconfigures motifs, sets, appropriating artifice and trompe-lʼoeil effects through her impressive technical skills and artistry.

In Jospinʼs hands, cardboard becomes ground, rock, stone, plant, mineral, through carving, construction, erosion, ruin—sovereign nature. In her strata of cardboard—cut, superimposed, juxtaposed, sanded— there now appears veins of faint colors, unseen in her prior work, strata of sediments of past geological eras. They mark a discreet evolution in the artistʼs work. This change was brought about gently, smoothly.

The introduction of color is parsimonious. Jospin likes to take her time. Then there is the time required by the work. « Every sculpture, installation, or ink drawing requires a lot of time, » she affirms. « Hence the few pieces produced each time. »

Her metaphorical uses of cardboard evolve, resulting in high rock walls with a pure, disturbing and impressive clarity of materiality and presence. They combine simplicity and sovereign strength. The magic of illusion, decoration, trompe-l’oeil is once again at work—or at play. A sharp cut into a mountainside appears palpable and reflects a variable brightness, depending on the time of day or night. The geological time of the sedimentation opens up projections and narrative figures on the surface of rock, hypnotic and serene.

The mineral makes itself more present in Jospinʼs work and leads to other sculptures, other explorations and new materials (bronze or plaster), other atmospheres as well. Her imaginary universe is always expanding, as is her investigation of art, architecture, and its representation. We find the forests, the caves, the temples, the decorative constructions, the familiar parts of emancipating and fertile reveries, rich in mysteries, in secrets. Jospinʼs new work, whether sculptures or ink drawings, engages other stories or myths that we study, feel, and hear, so we can then recount them ourselves.

Christine Coste

Translation: Madeleine Compagnon