To approach Pauline Brun’s work, one must immediately begin by isolating two spaces: the physical, geographical or architectural one, the one that finally delimits, and the more metaphysical one, of creation, of the very logic of the work in becoming. Both spaces have their own parameters. They have their own rules and laws and allow the artist to operate within a framework that imposes its limits, the contexts that govern it. Pauline Brun’s work is therefore an attempt to apply within the framework of these limits, a succession of operations, of gestures that will push back these borders and in so doing, erase them to create a third space which is that of the work.

A space that will know how to bring them all together to capture, in one movement, these vibrations and friction of elements that seemed isolated at first, but which suddenly, and together, make sense. If we isolate from the start two spaces, perhaps we can also evoke two gestures that are proper to them: the reversal, and the injection of narrative processes. Pauline Brun’s works are designed for spaces. It will always be a work that will echo the place that is supposed to house it. Thus the stake of the work is to use the constraints of the place to operate a disruption that I call here reversal. Here, a wooden board is transformed into a suspended surface, needing to be shaped by the action of the paint which imposes its weight and physical properties on it for a period of drying. There the walls or partitions are used as raw material for the elaboration of a sculpture of which one would not know besides if it is about a sculpture or the base waiting for its work. It seems that the wall itself has set itself in motion and that, in a great effort, it has managed to push back the matter that encircled it and constituted it, thus extracting itself from its condition. The space itself, taken in its physical constraints, is thus treated as a material that the artist comes to sculpt as he pleases, pulling it, twisting it, pushing it to the extreme. To isolate these elements, to take them out of their initial context and turn them around to make them what they are not, is therefore to ask the question of what they are. It is by asking this question that narrative games begin. The artist voluntarily leaves his trace in the manipulation of these spaces, and plays with it. Blurring the tracks, creating false ones, erasing some, accentuating the line at times. To isolate the constituent matter of space and to treat it as an object, is to give it a body. The works and the space thus carry the traces of their own history which one would never know if they take part of a fiction or document the realization of the plastic work. A body bearing the scars of a game or a confrontation between him and the artist. A whole poetic and pictorial vocabulary is thus deployed which makes the bodies reason with each other, the materials and the forms. The cutting of the partition reveals the wall that supports it, thus stratifying the architecture of the White Cube to better reveal its double belonging, as a space, to both the theoretical and architectural universe. In the same gesture, it returns to its condition of historical object, the one that can be told.

And if the artist leaves traces, proofs of her passage, it is because Pauline Brun’s work is ultimately nothing other than the practice of these spaces. It is through the experience of handling these different objects that the work appears. It is because the wall partition has become a sculpture, that the space can be read in its poetic dimension, revealing the history of which it is the bearer, a history that would not have been revealed if the artist’s gesture had not discovered it. It is thus a base that we observe, the very one that supports the practice and the experience that, thus, united in a gesture make work. In the end, it is through the body, and through the artist’s body so often staged or put into play in her work (and one suddenly makes the link between this red surface taken in her time of release and the costume that the artist wears in some of her videos, work that is not presented here and that therefore allows this lapse of time necessary for the cleaning and drying of the costume), that Pauline Brun reveals the spaces in which her work takes shape. And it is through the experience of these spaces that she manages to create the one in which the artwork unfolds.

Arthur Eskenazi