Selected Texts

Sasha Ferré, Averno

by Filipa Ramos

"The underworld that the Averno of Ferré’s exhibition leads to is also the haven of the bygone souls. It echoes Louise Glück’s compilation of dark and nocturnal poems gathered in the book that bears the same name, Averno (2006). In it, the late poet explores the complementarity of truth and fiction, life and death, youth and old age. (...) Ferré’s Averno is also a space where something intense and untamable is being desired and plotted, echoing Glück’s poem Blue Rotunda:

“I am tired of having hands

she said

I want wings—

But what will you do without your hands

to be human?

I am tired of human

she said

I want to live on the sun—”

Indeed the energy that emanates from the paintings that constitute this Averno is contagious and brutal. It is centrifugal and centripetal, organic and alien, soft and savage, telluric and celestial, raw and complex.

It is rare to sense a transference of mood across the making and the viewing of an artwork. Generally, the experience of a painter remains locked within the making and what emerges are the figures and forms that have been created. Yet the haptic pleasure of a body making art is evident and contagious in Ferré’s paintings. By working horizontally, traversing and occupying the canvases and wood panels that lie freely on the floor, Ferré’s body performs a continuum of choreographic gestures which still reveal themselves in the final artworks. These movements are accompanied by a form of tactile pleasure that, again, is intensely expressed by her paintings but that also emerges from how her hands hold and her fingers mix the painting materials she uses. Ferré works with pigment sticks of oil paint, which are handmade with beeswax and plant wax combined with linseed oil and pigment. These oil sticks allow her to work directly on a canvas or a wood panel, without any brushes or solvents. Her gestures, repeatedly applying the colors with her hands, mixing the pigments with her fingers on the canvas while new hues emerge, are retained and remembered by the materials that hold them. “The hand caressing colors makes butterflies,” I scribbled on my notebook while we were still speaking on the phone. That hand is improvising a gesture rehearsed for very long. It is grounding a practice that knows how forms come into being, and what becoming means from a plastic point of view.

It was said that the volcanic fumes that emanated from the crater of the Averno were so toxic that any bird flying above it would die. Hence its Greek name, ἄϝορνος, birdless (, without, ὄρνις, bird). Here, instead, a multiplicity of creatures, living beings, and expressive possibilities manifest themselves the more each painting is looked upon. These paintings are as wild and free as the colors and traces they hold. This new Averno opens itself to host a permanent present in which the instant becomes the movement and the movement becomes the form. Here, the Averno doesn’t pull downwards. Instead, it stays in joy, forever erupting and pulsating."

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Sasha Ferré / Toccata

By Cedric Fauq

"Le tour de force de Sasha Ferré consiste alors à faire émerger une peinture qui touche à la nature non pas en cherchant à la représenter mais à la faire sentir. C’est cette faille entre le paysage et la peinture abstraite qu’habite l’artiste, déployant un univers de feuillages, vagues, flammes et coraux qu’on ne saurait plus voir mais qu’il faudrait réapprendre à toucher (au-delà du scroll infini des écrans). Les titres de ses œuvres sont les seconds témoins de cette entreprise. Extraits des recueils de poésie Falling Awake (2016) et Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea (2019) de la poète britannique Alice Oswald, ils amplifient la part d’« écologie sensuelle » du travail de Sasha Ferré (pour ne donner qu’un exemple : Closer and closer to the ground, 2023)."

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Unstable Natures

By Sophie J Williamson

"Rather than depicting nature as we commonly perceive it, Ferré allows intuition to invent a new, wilder one, unconfined by human ecostructures and manipulated ecologies. Trying to escape our preconceived perception of what nature can or should be, she avoids portraying anything too close to a recognizable form. Her organic cacophonies remain raw and in a fluid state, unresolved and dissolve into one another. They are fertile; abundant possibility. The suggestions of climbing veins, reaching stems, arches of leaves or curvatures of petals that creep over the canvases are indeterminate and in a process of reforming; perhaps ghosts of past organic lives or whispers of futures ones, and very possibly both. Alive with electrifying colour, the dense, lush growth meshes into one another, and itself, evoking the forests and jungles of dreamscapes, psychedelic visions or the mystic imagination. As Tim Ingold questions, why should reality be separated from our imagining of it? Instead, he suggests a practice of imagining for the real, where an imagined landscape ‘is a landscape not of being but of becoming: a composition not of objects and surfaces but of movements and stillness, not there to be surveyed but cast in the current of time.’ This autopoiesis is played out on each of Ferré’s canvas’, where an unknown vegetal wildness is in an ongoing state of becoming, bringing itself into the world."

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Gardens of Paint: The Work of Sasha Ferré

By Tim Ingold

"What it brings forth is not a picture of a garden, which brings to mind its radiance and sensory excess. It is not an evocation of the real thing, calling up memories of gardens once visited, or representing what perhaps can still be glimpsed through the open window. It is an indoor garden in itself. Perhaps we find ourselves responding, however, in a not dissimilar way. What is it about a garden, we might ask, that makes it such a feast for the senses? Why does it enchant? Remember that the chant is a lilting, melodious song, which has the power to lure the attention of anyone who strays within its auditory ambit, to the extent of being drawn irresistibly to its numinous source. Perhaps, on a summer’s day, the garden also sings, with the trill of birds and the murmur of insects. But it is also a riot of colour. And colour, to the eyes, is what melody is to the ears. It draws us in. Thus captivated, we are no longer spectators, admiring the garden as if it were a tableau, but participants, snared in its vegetative tangle. It’s hard to take our eyes from it. As we linger, the garden rekindles in our hearts the same vitality that courses through the veins of plants. We come away refreshed, not because of any reconnection with ‘nature’, but because it makes us feel alive."

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The Rustle of the Living - The Paintings of Sasha Ferré 

By Teresa Castro

"Saying that a painting makes a sound, that it rustles, is unexpected. Painting is about silence –“mute poetry,” according to an old saying. Yet, looking at the paintings of Sasha Ferré, we are struck by an impression of quivering. It’s not just that the painting vibrates – for it does vibrate, it even throbs, as if the color-material of her paintings were animated by the breath of life. Under the curtains of leaves, the screens of feathers or fur, the interlacing of filaments, we hear something like a subtle murmuring. You just have to listen carefully, and you’ll hear the rustle of the living."

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Biography

Sasha Ferré is a visual artist working and living in Paris. She has exhibited in the US and Europe and is the recipient of the Hine Painting Prize in 2020. In 2022, she made her debut in Asia with a solo exhibition at The Anzai Gallery in Tokyo, Japan. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (London) and a BA in Art History from La Sorbonne University (Paris). She is represented by Almine Rech gallery.


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