In immediate and almost constant contact with our skin, fabric sends us back to our intimacy as well as to the sense of touch. Agathe Bouton uses a thousand surfaces to reveal what such a material can offer when it is torn, patched, sewn, and assembled in order to become thicker and heavier, or else more refined.

With these hanging fabrics she creates moving walls and suggests a new way of inhabiting space ; an evocation of ‘fabrics drying on terraces or hanging in the tents of nomads.’ The artist guides us as we go through these works to share in this reflection on inhabited space, and its echoes of our interior space.

At the same time our visual perception is appealed to by the vast chromatic palette of fabric dyed, painted, washed and faded. These textiles, in their superimposition and their transparence, can be perceived as the humble insciptions of humanity on the material world – traces of our daily life. Marked by the deteriorations caused by exposure to the sun and the rain, these textile installations by Agathe Bouton bear witness to a memory.

Chimène Caputi-Joubert