Le voyage vertical

Tatiana Trouvé, Le voyage vertical, 2022 from the series Les dessouvenirs

The Pinault Collection is currently hosting a major retrospective of art by Tatiana Trouvé at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, which I got to see earlier this month. It includes work from the series Les dessouvenus (2013–ongoing) in which 'the Paris-based artist first douses large sheets of coloured paper into bleach before drawing ‘environmental dramas’ atop the stained surface in pencil. Similarly, The Great Atlas of Disorientation (2019) echoes the surreal bleached effects of the previous series, this time rendered in watercolour, recalling mushroom clouds in one work, or smoke and halos in another' (Frieze). These are dream landscapes which blur the distinction between interior spaces and exterior views, like confused memories. However the trees, forests, mountains and quarries also have an 'ominous atmosphere', to quote the Venice curators, suggesting 'a planet progressively destroyed by human action.'

Tatiana Trouvé, The Border, 2019 from the series The Great Atlas of Disorientation

These are not the only ways in which landscape enters Trouvé's work. She is very influenced by writers who I have talked about on this blog before and has made marble sculptures of their books: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. I'll note here three more examples of the ways in which landscapes can be seen in her work.

• 'Walking on streets, forest paths, or by the sea, Tatiana Trouvé picked up objects and had casts made of these relics in bronze, brass, steel, and aluminium, then painted them. Each necklace bears the name of the place of the finding and the time Trouvé was there.' These sculptures derived from walks in the landscape relate to various places in Europe, but I was interested to see one that she made at that epicentre of contemporary post-industrial nature writing, landscape and sound art in Britain: Orford Ness.

• Two plaster casts resembling relief maps in the exhibition space 'originated in impressions that Tatiana Trouvé took on the streets of Montreuil in the aftermath of the riots provoked by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year boy of North African descent in June 2023. The molds made from the rests of the riots-burnt garbage bins, melted plastics and scorched shopfronts-transform into an abstracted landscape that registers the volcanic rage of the disenfranchised and maps the turbulence of the present.'

• Another work can be connected to the city that is hosting this exhibition. Trouvé turned an irregular metal form resulting from an accident in a foundry into 'a sculptural terra incognita, a territory or perhaps a volcanic landscape waiting to be discovered. On a sheet of aluminum card are engraved the feminine names of fifty-five imaginary cities from Italo Calvino's novel Invisible cities.' In Calvino's story 'it transpires that all the places Marco Polo describes are aspects of one city: Venice', and 'just like Calvino, Trouvé explores the porous boundaries of memory and imagination.'