Behind the Seen - Emma Febvre-Richards

8 June - 14 July 2002 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
Behind the Seen engages with a long art history. Looking back to the painting on plaster of the Renaissance frescoes, its subject extends beyond the frame and across the wall itself. It questions the traditional easel painting which functions like a window into the world and, like minimalist art practice of the 1960s and ’70s, it treats the painting as an object rather than a transparent screen of projection.

Like a number of artists who have exhibited in this space before her, Emma Febvre-Richards responds directly to the architecture of the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery. Using wooden and silicon moulds, she has cast a new corridor in fibrous plaster, fibreglass and resin. These new walls mimic the permanent white walls of the Hirschfeld Gallery which camouflage the room’s original interior, for the most part, like a second skin. Disrupting the apparent neutrality of the white walls that go hand in hand with contemporary art galleries, the construction of the walls in Behind the Seen is not seamless—the bolts and reinforcements holding them in place are visible, as is the space between the new and existing walls.

Casting stretchers (the wooden support over which canvas is stretched and a painting made) at regular intervals along the wall, Febvre-Richards eliminates the traditional edge and frame of the painting and includes the wall itself as the subject of her work. Positioning the stretchers’ imprints at knee level leaves the wall within our accustomed range of focus and attention. And in having the viewer walk the length of the space between the stretcher’s negative imprint on one side and the positive imprint on the other, Febvre-Richards stresses the painting as an object that occupies real space.

By casting one section of the work in fibreglass and resin, impressions of the space behind that part of the wall can be seen. Here, Febvre-Richards plays with the convention of seeing the painting as a portable window that once set on the wall appears to open imaginary space complete with illusory depth. In Behind the Seen the conventional illusion of space created within a painting is replaced by actual space, as the stretcher now literally functions as a window onto the room behind.

Unlike a painting, which is generally reliant on the hand of the painter for its originality and expressiveness, Behind the Seen bears little physical trace of the artist’s hand. The textures and discrepancies in the plaster and fibreglass are a direct result of the casting process, contracted out by the artist to industrial fabricators. Regular and strictly symmetrical, the installation acknowledges the serial production of its elements. Yet the rhythmic punctuation of the repeated shape down the length of the work, and its minimalist aesthetic of reduced colour and ornamentation lends the installation a calm beauty.

 

Rebecca Wilson

Emma Febvre-Richards studied painting in France, and was awarded the equivalent of a Master of Fine Arts in 1995. Her work was last seen in the Hirschfeld Gallery in a group show called Practising Beauty in 2000. Febvre-Richards lives in Wellington and teaches at the College of Design and Fine Arts at Massey University.