“From a very early age, I was deeply affected by this inevitable fact: time flows through us completely.
I have lived through intimate and collective experiences in which I glimpsed the furious intensity. Wounded, ambiguous, and innately from oneself to the other.”
Portrait
– © Benoit LelongLucia Salzgeber understands deeply, thanks to her paternal grandmother, a Jew who survived the camps, that human beings can transcend themselves.
Lucia Salzgeber understands deeply, thanks to her paternal grandmother, a Jew who survived the camps, that human beings can transcend themselves. At a very young age, she lived through intimate and collective experiences in which she tried to catch a glimpse of the furious, wounded, ambiguous and primal intensity of herself and the other.
She sketches and fills dozens of notebooks that still follow her. Writing is a way to “heal” the mind: “Why is writing difficult when things become?”
Lucia Salzgeber fragments her life by long moments of creation in an intense solitude which give birth to installations mixing body, pictorial and performative languages.
For several years, she built a place where Incidence is the key word.
In 2017, Lucia Salzgeber moved into a 7,000 square meter former granite factory, a building she named Relief, a sensitive balance between relief and oscillations.
The studio, hung in a pit like a moored boat, is held by its bleached walls. On the ground, an expanse in black and white awaits. Dozens of paintings lie down.
Upright, with a black apron and hands greased with black ink, she sizes her white paper.
She silently beats the rhythm of a single classical music piece that envelops her for hours. Equipped with her thick-coated scrapes, she lays her body on the ground and on the white surface, which moves this moment.
The artist Lucia Salzgeber digs white with black. She releases the black and delivers the white. She writes a temporality in the timeless.
Emotion, torsion and narration are the crucibles of her research work on alterity.
Her works are time-markers in resonance with her life:
L’Odeur de l’Ombre [The Smell of the Shadow];
Lueur d’être [Light of Being];
Rides des Reliefs [Reliefs’ Wrinkles];
Ils se compromettaient dans la buée [They were engaging in the mist];
Le ciel est clos [Closed Sky];
Il tourment [He torments];
Le drap de sa traversée [The sheet of his Journey];
Houle sourde [Slack Swell];
Froide [Cold]…
stimulating an instinctive contemplation in the other.
Like a perpetual beginning, with an intangible feverishness, her work is a back and forth between painting, writing and installations. That triad gives all the thickness to her work.