Sabine Cibert creates large textile compositions, contemporary re-imaginings of the draperies of yesteryear. It can take up to two years for each handmade piece to see the light of day. Each piece, which covers several square metres, is part of a series. Out of angular, rigid elements – rectangles and squares – she creates an unstable and dynamic atmosphere.

The large format allows her to create expanding landscapes, colourful and shifting, which expand outwards. The use of textiles provides an endless choice of colours, while the weaves offer a wide variety of patterns. Pixellated images are thus formed, as if diffracted, an echo that spreads and rebounds in all directions.

Inspired by Paul Klee and Karl Hermann Haupt’s studies of abstraction, sabine cibert analyses, dissects and reappropriates the initial motif. She is also inspired by nature – violent and spectacular, filled with mountains, glaciers, ravines and torrents. Her work could best be summed up as sensitive abstraction.

In her latest research aquatic worlds are primordial. Water is a reflective surface in which the world’s colours are refracted. The textile surface becomes a body of water that the wind streaks, that the stone ripples, where the light vibrates.

Beyond the evocation of a landscape, the works make it possible to see what is not seen: the shadow, the breath, the stone that has just broken the surface. It is, in a sense, the capture of deep and telluric vibrations, of furtive accidents that produce disorder, although each piece is composed slowly and patiently in a quasi-meditative process.

Thomas Leveugle
art historian, curator
March 2017