Ceysson & Bénétière

A Liquid Antagonism

There are artworks that immediately tell you a lot about themselves, about how they were made, about their context in the history of art, about the artist’s intention, about their subject and their content. At the other end of the communication spectrum are those works that willfully conceal these same properties, burying their making, their meaning, their purpose (supposing they have one) so deeply that only future scholars are likely to successfully excavate them. The recent work of Isabelle Champion Metadier seems to position itself somewhere between these two extremes. On the one hand, the imagery clearly references the realm of human constructions, from machines to architecture to weapons to toys, but at the same time we can never be certain whether the artist is presenting us with things that exist in the world or whether these are pure inventions, whether these images are as fact-based as the illustrations in Diderot’s Encyclopédie or as purely fantastic as Piranesi’s Carceri. 

This ambiguity extends to technique and process. For a long time, Champion Metadier was known as a painter, but her increasing involvement with digital mediums has led her away from paint and canvas and toward the computer screen. And yet, rather than embrace the infinite reproducibility of the digital image, she has chosen to create unique works. In another twist, the medium she employs to make these single works—digital printing—is usually prized for its ability to quickly produce multiple and identical works. Here, each print is an edition of one. To create these singular images, the artist draws and cuts and pastes with a mouse, working intensively on each file, sometimes for months at a time, until she achieves the desired result, taking full advantage of what she calls “the liquid image.” 

The software Champion Metadier relies on is a basic drawing program. Intentionally, she declines the temptation of the latest digital technology. It’s worth noting that when Albert Oehlen was making his “Computer Paintings” in the 1990s, like Champion Metadier he preferred to utilize the most basic of design software. Why, we can’t help asking, would these two highly sophisticated artists, who could surely use the most advanced software if they wished, choose a slower, less responsive product? In both cases, I believe, it is because the artists are not seduced by the chimera of technological progress, and because they want to be able to retain some qualities of their “hand” even as it is filtered through digital software. Indeed, Champion Metadier is far more concerned with the dangers of technological advance than with its benefits. A century or more after the “bachelor machines” of Duchamp and Picabia, Champion Metadier is inviting us to think about the insidious techniques of social control and personal desensitizing that increasingly surround and penetrate us. With a heartfelt irony, she employs digital composition to warn against the “prosthetic gods” (as Freud put it) that we welcome everyday into our factories, our bodies, our minds.

Ultimately, however, the high-tech origins and social commentary imbedded in Champion Metadier’s images are less important than the distinctive and disjunctive visual syntax she has developed over a long career. As she explained some 20 years ago to Le Monde’s critic Philippe Dagen: “Frequently I have the temptation to bring together contradictory elements in my painting in order to see if reconciliations are possible or, if that’s not the case, to benefit from certain antagonisms and to understand the energies that are thereby liberated.” And she continues to liberate such energies.

Raphael Rubinstein, October 2023

*Philippe Dagen, Les inattendus d’Isabelle Champion Metadier, Le Monde, May 16, 2002. (Translation by the author)