Anne Laure Sacriste / Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg

Anne Laure Sacriste / Orion Aveugle

text by Domenico de Chirico

Januar 30 – 31 March 2019


Galerie Vera Munro
Heilwigstrasse 64
20249 Hamburg

In an evocative balance between minimalism and symbolism, and closely linked to a sophisticated and
harmonious development of elements, the work by the multi-faceted Anne Laure Sacriste focuses on the
ontological matter of painting and on the visual perception that we generally have of it, creating an eccentric
visionary repertoire that unfolds between nature and fantasy. This specifc pictorial research is essentially based
on an observational activity, frst of reality and then of fgurative abstraction, in which the relationship with
space is a fundamental as the one with gestures and the intuition of forms. The artist’s work displays
predominant characteristics that reveal her classical education, clarity, logic and order. ALS in fact, is strongly
inspired among others by the classical tendency of French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), by the romanticism
of German artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), by the neoclassical paintings of French Jean Baptiste
Dominique Ingres (1780 -1867) and by the symbolist ones of German artist Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901). The
landscape, which represents one of the basic elements of her artworks, can be assessed with such classical
composure, highlighting the dignifed and bucolic attitude that intellectuals, from the 17th century onwards had
taken with regard to nature.

Monochromatic background, plants and ornaments, are all intensifed through a fusion process between visual
history and a free association of images, typical of psychoanalysis, in order to simultaneously undermine the
ideals of classical clarity and those of decrypted analysis.
ALS researches to represent the possibilities to represent what is real as well as those violations ofered by
fantasy: Her paintings are an invitation to move further and step into a world where time is suspended and
apparently unintelligible, in which the emblematic element of the landscape carries a symbolic narrative. Each
one of her artworks allegorically represents a passage from one place to another, where wishes, worries and
creative impulses camoufage in medias res. Theses worlds which can be observed, disrupt what lies beyond what
is concrete and empirical – a creative universe in which poetry and painting work hand in hand in the description
of nature and of the status quo of things.

The landscape is marked with an immateriality in which the oxymoron between darkness and light plays on the
thin line between gesture and emptiness.

– Domenico de Chirico