Quiet lives

Technique: engraving.
Exhibition available in several formats.

In German, a still life is a "Stillleben" - a quiet life, an expression that perfectly suits Coudrain's rigorous and sensitive world. Constantly returning to the same themes, which she varies into multiple motifs, Coudrain deconstructs and reconstructs landscapes and objects (here grasses, flowers, leaves, fruits and vegetables), which she has chosen or which have imposed themselves on her... It is as a composer that she plays with their chords or their dissonances, working obstinately with the deliberately restricted range of her palette (ochres, siennas, grays).

Coudrain holds a very special place in contemporary engraving, at the highest level of a technique that she puts at the service of timeless subjects, with little concern for adhering to the imperatives of fashions that she magnificently ignores.
From the germination of plants to the evocation of a landscape, everything functions according to laws, and everything obeys a kind of inner music which is that of harmony, as it was prescribed in times of profound humanism.

It's a bit as if Coudrain were always asking the same fundamental question of the poet: "Inanimate objects, do you have a soul?", not to elucidate the mystery, but rather to make it resonate differently each time, for other harmonics. A work that is not marked by the shadow of anguish, that can please those who seek in art the answer to the questions that we secretly ask ourselves.

Text freely developed from writings by Michel Méresse (Spécial Saga, 1989) and Jean-Jacques Lévèque (Saga, 1992).