TEXTS

« These are the objects of whom we ask,
for from them we can obtain, that they draw
us out of our night. »
Francis Ponge
L’Atelier contemporain,
Gallimard, 1977, p. 75.

It all begins with a glance
Because for Lumi Lorthe the first act is that of observation. Naked vision, the customary distance from eye to object, coupled with seeking out the finest, most infinitely minute relief contained within and upon all things, which confer to organic forms a more essential and thus often more abstract character.
Lumi observes, contemplates, searching for life’s translation and re-creation..
Her eyrie, encircled by high walls, dominates the limestone crests that draw out the first foothills of the southern Cévennes mountains. Half way between the Rhône and the Gardon rivers. Half way between the Cevenne outcrops and the coastal plains. Here where light is never absent and where the underlying limestone practices hollowing out secret vaults.
At first sight, the tortured wood of olive groves, the wide spreading leaves of fig trees, acorns scattered on rocky white paths.
Even closer still, a garden growing wild were it not for the loving care of the artist, always ready to welcome honey-suckle tendrils, pumpkin curves, lime tree’s scent and the cottony tissue of cistes.
It all began in the shade of this garden, surrounded by these olive trees whose silhouettes she rediscovered in Tuscany and Sardinia, or in the words of the poets she so loves, Lumi found sufficient inspiration so that through this vegetal world she inhabits, she discovered the wish, the will and the need to approach life’s essence and to give us back life’s reflexion. Her picture.
Her first image.

Everything comes from the living

This first image, familiar, at hand, seemed initially too inanimate. So, with strokes of charcoal, graphite, pastels or ink, Lumi sought to reconstruct another living image.
And then the human face appeared. First of all that face whose memory these southern limestone caves had retained. Her workshop was covered in human tracks, foot steps, hand prints, traces of suggestive silhouettes.

Lumi had reinvented the rock face of her own grotto, so near yet so distant.
She brought into the light those depersonalized, parcellised bodies sending out a friendly echo to these first human signatures, a tribute to those cloistered presences, sheltered from the light of day.
Following these prints and outlines came bodies, almost entirely torsos, seized in movement. Gestures begun, life begun, set in its own matter, just as Lumi sometimes stops short in movement, breaks off in mid-sentence, suspends her glance.
These torsos belong to bodies come from nowhere, instantaneously held, sensitive though already divided, carried by their own energy, perceptible through ‘infra-movements’.
“It is more important to me to paint the intensity of sensitive bodies, to capture the vibrations and forces which drive them (…) to render visible—or at least present—something which pertains to the rule of vital energy.”
Thus to paint energy in action.

However, very soon, the human body—even naked, for a divided body is always naked—revealed too many stories, uncontrolled references and movements.
Now Lumi only seeks to express slowness and spareness of gesture.
Her art only proposes to our vision that which it can recompose by itself.
Imposing nothing and leaving the eye free to shape contours at its guise.

Lumi, from then on, looked out for material already forged and shaped by time and the elements.
The matter of the vegetal world, or that of tiny animal life (shells, lichens…) now offered her a multitude of textures, organizations, bone structures, surfaces, presences, whose richness exceeded by far that smooth, mobile, human envelope.
As of 1996, it is these visual impressions that Lumi fixes in order to paint the living and which nourish several series, shaping organic residences, germinations, spheres, fractures, bonds….

So many forms of pods, so many twig outlines, all these root tangles… bereft of any anecdote other than that of having grown here, which persist, after life, in showing off a dry permanence.
This vegetal world of emancipated structure led her towards a universe of forms free of recounting, free of any story. For her, from now on, there is no other adventure than that of germination seized in action, growth frozen, fruition accomplished… and no other future than that of abandon to the sun, wind and cold of this matter shaped in patience.
This rhythm is suited to limestone splinters, so pale, to stiff branches, so dry, to armoured seeds, so round, to all these warped and frail vegetal fragments which we find transformed in Demeures Organiques (1996-1997), Germinations (1998), Pedoncules (1999), etc.

And, when the ordinary garrigue no longer sufficed to fill her workshop / come curiosity shop, Lumi turned to the sea.
From her farthest treks she came home laden with shells, valves, pebbles, sea-weed, dried sea-urchins, drift wood…
Then, for one must return from seascape to one’s own biotope—and, yet again, to patience—she attached herself over several years to lichens, those ultimate forms of living resistance, between mushroom and seaweed, almost immobile according to our time scale and yet so powerful and so tenacious.
Through this protean vegetable, covering with its vermiculated crust the stones of all surrounding paths, she discovered the plastic potential of links, networks, inlays, and so renewed, almost naturally, her apprenticeship of engraving.
This was an opportunity for her to perfect different printing techniques, each one appropriate to the intuitively researched image: engraved plaster matrix, each proof hand printed by the simple pressure of the palm, ink drawings on polyester, offset-printed film… This work resulted in two books, Incrustations (2002) and Lichens (2003).

Imprints, silhouettes, torsos, objects from nature… Lumi has always drawn living volumes with both her hand and her eye.
The sky could have been present too, that matter so ceaselessly sculptured, the mountains also, whose profiles crowd the horizons… But that would have been too vast for her vision, too impalpable for her hand.
“These are the objects of whom we ask, for from them we obtain…”

All is shaped in matter

Lumi’s paper knows neither sky blue nor forest green, nor the colour of wine nor of ripe fruit. Her paper is mineral-coloured, earth-coloured: rock-coloured, clay-coloured, leaf mould-coloured, stump-coloured.
Her art, which one would be mistaken to perceive as monochrome, permits shapes to unfold in all their intensity, in all their reality, in all their exactitude.
(She had already rendered to human bodies their own matter, from which they drew their force.)

From now on, matter alone nourishes her fantasy. Imaginary world which discovered its most precise formula in the root-object. No longer entirely object, but a shape which has been alive and which offers us its fossilized matter: a deserted shell, a dry root or fruit, a laminated, stratified fungus…
Root-object: such is the motif (often in series) which allows indeterminate matter to organize itself, to affirm its presence in order to better take root in our memory.

All is accomplished by presence

It is a long path that leads from chaos to presence, and it is on that narrow way that Lumi travels… at a certain distance from contemporary influences, in the solitude that she chose and which she continues to preserve…
Restoring shape to presence when all is deconstructed.

To accomplish this she works her images in line drawings (always charcoal, pastel, graphite or ink), immediate and sensitive intermediaries between her thought and the live world which inhabits her. She draws the organic forms of the root-object, then cuts it out, breaks it down into elements which she then re-assembles to reconstruct “flat volumes”. Sometimes this volume construction results from pictural matter obtained through controlling the data of hazard.
Then there forms on the paper an “infra-relief”, an entirely new form which does not resemble any “real” living form, but which meets up with that via the quality of its presence, by its tangible volume and its suggested tensions.

Obtaining presence-forms from inanimate objects: a means of revisiting still-life? A means nevertheless of translating through the cohesion of drawing / painting / sculpture the energy emanating from matter fossilised by time, by sun or by wind.
Neither line painting, nor surface painting, but original sculpture of presence.

For Lumi Lorthe’s art, which is far from ephemeral, is nevertheless that of a presence sculptured in paper.

Anne Bresson-Lucas,
mars 2009.
(Translation by Sarah Harrison)