To capture the shadow of flowers, an idea like a poem that brings to mind incertitude and indecision.
The two series of works presented by Eftihis Patsourakis at the Quai toy with this shadowy idea – from the yellowed shadow cast by time passing to our own shadow that threatens.

Through a series of new paintings created especially for the exhibition during a residency at the Moulin des Ribes in Grasse, the artist uncovers the traces of a world on fire, of everyday life that goes up in smoke and, exhaling, sketches cosmic and ghostly worlds.

Eftihis Patsourakis’s practice always begins by a process of gathering, a stroll on the outskirts of town during which the artist collects objects that have been abandoned and forgotten, like shadows. A child’s shoe, a guitar, tree bark, a bird’s feather, all of them references to an everyday reality that passes and accumulates during the course of our lives. These fragments become the material of his works, a material that he burns and transforms. Metamorphosed – a powdered alchemy of particles, ash and dust – the smoke blackens the canvas, burns and marks its surface.

To summon fire is to practice destruction, but it is also a ritual of something still to come, an ancestral ritual of purification. “Everything changes with fire” (Bachelard).

The smoke obtained by the artist by burning the collected residue varies depending on the object and its texture, on the wind passing through the studio at that moment, or the angle of the canvas. The artist hangs a painting from the ceiling and positions its surface so that it plays with the smoke of burned objects and draws galactic shapes and cosmogonies.

In the still lives series, it is also about what remains, the archive of a life behind the frame. The cast shadow cut-out creates a photogram. In the 1970s, cross-stitch embroidery kits were sold as a practical means to create paintings at home following a stitch-by-numbers colour code. As soon as the embroidery, often with floral motifs, was finished, it was hung on the wall.

These somewhat sad still lives, with their organised creativity set in a demarked space, already evoke the Modernist grid. They were collected by the artist across different flea markets. In the process of unframing them, once the embroidered canvas is removed from the cardboard backing, what appears is the cast shadow of the pattern that each stitch had protected from sunlight. What remains is the shadow – the trace of a life that the painting saw as it hung on a wall in the kitchen or bedroom, the shadow cast by fleeting time.

Before becoming a technique developed by Nicéphore Niepce and Louis Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot’s drawings made with light constitute the first steps in the history of photography and raise the question of how to preserve the outline of a shadow or the trace of light.

The two series are based on photographic processes: sunlight or smoke fix the image of an object and of its melancholic absence.