To make a painting, for Claudie Laks, is both to create a space and to be part of a story. It’s creating a place in another. And I like to think that this artist's way of leaving an unpainted margin at the four edges of his canvas is the sign of this installation in a place already there: a way of distinguishing its limits from those that the painting poses a priori. Looked at from a distance, in the relative distance that the workshop allows, this is first of all what these tables show. This way the artist has to work within the Spartan limits of the painting, as if an area was given to him to cultivate, with prohibition to leave it. Not that the artist submits to this logic of the edge, but because it does with it, building precarious balance and internal tension in a way, fragile since we are there in the unpainted, of leaning against this border invisible.

 

Text : Pierre Wat, Extrait, in catalogue, Claudie Laks, Peinture 2004-2007, éditions Hazan