Colours for a World is a collection of pigments that bears witness to an elaborate process of erasure of a World Atlas. It is the companion work to National Geographic Atlas of the World: the sanded book from which the pigments were collected and that now act as a record of a laborious and time-intensive process. Using sandpaper, Roch-Cuerrier has meticulously removed the pigments from the supporting pages, transferring the remains of this erasure in labelled plastic bags.
The series of sachets are chromatically arranged from chalky aquamarine to powdery emeralds, classified according to their former representation in the Atlas. It is an attempt to distill these concepts and return them to their very essence. Concepts such as the Universe or the World are reduced to a colour and suddenly become tangible objects. Colours for a World is an attempt to materialize the unfathomable.
Installation view, Apparaître/disparaître, Fondation Grantham, Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham, 2019
Through the abstraction of the original content of the Atlas in a series of pigment sachets, the artist hopes to open up the interpretation of these colours to a new potential and propose a reconfiguration of the World previously illustrated in the Atlas. Colours for a World calls into question the abstraction of the geographical discipline: the incoherence of cartography in relation to the territory.
JULIE ROCH-CUERRIER 