2nd Prize – Call for Contemporary Creation 2016

Creation – Marie Sirgue, artist born in 1985, lives and works in France (Paris). Weaving – Atelier A2, Aubusson Low-warp tapestry, cotton warp, wool weft Dimensions: 3m height x 2m width Dyeing: Thierry Roger, Aubusson

Marie Sirgue plays with the subversion of objects, trompe-l'œil techniques using mismatched materials, bestowing a new identity and a greater nobility to the reference object, especially when it is mundane, poor, or sometimes outdated. Her installations, set up in urban spaces, architecture, and interiors, provoke a confrontation between the familiar and the unusual. Formal evocations come together with the impossible.

The utilitarian nature of everyday objects is replaced by poetry, imagination, and the unexpected. The artist uses craftsmanship to highlight the ordinary and sometimes even reverses the process, using the poor to trivialize the precious. Here, she chose to translate a blue plastic tarp into tapestry. From a distance, the eye is deceived, but upon closer inspection, the references blur, and the work takes on a pictorial quality similar to painting, only to become, up close, a woven work in its full nature. The tapestry is not a copy of the tarp, but an interpretation in which all forms of abstraction participate in reinventing the model without betraying it.