“I want to produce a complete picture, not an assembly of parts, a picture produced as a whole […] you won’t be able to tell how the colours have been added […] they will be added as ever, but you can’t pinpoint where one changes into another.¹ ” 

In 1912, Robert Delaunay started on a series Fenêtres in which he deconstructed the panorama he could see outside his studio. Technically speaking, the scenery was but a juxtaposition of colours and contrasts perceived simultaneously, in a single moment.

Like the Delaunays, Sabine Cibert creates works of nothing but colour and in a single material: textile.

Thousands of squares painstakingly collected and prepared then assembled. One feature of textiles is that they have not only their own architecture, in the form of their weave, but also their own colour. The artist uses these pieces of fabric to produce a composition bordering on abstraction, in which you try to pinpoint where one colour is abandoned for another.

What is Sabine Cibert deconstructing in order to reconstruct it using colour? Scenery, like Delaunay maybe. But more in the approach adopted by Maria Helena Vieira Da Silva, a central figure in abstract landscaping, hers are as much before our eyes as within ourselves.

These compositions are produced in exactly the same way, except for a few technical details,  textile squares painstakingly assembled by hand then sewn together, yet each one is different. Like unique scenery transformed by each season, like contradictory emotions sweeping a single mind only to evaporate in an instant.

Sabine Cibert’s Landscapes is a series of ten works in the form of panoramas rotating seasons and changing plants. Technical dexterity to produce from multiple contrasting textiles a fragile unity. Few hits pointing to the seminal motif. Does it even exist?  This slow work is also the passing of time before our eyes: the rotating seasons.

Dawn evokes the moment when all is on the cusp of change. The colours are shot with light, an in the dawning or dusking of spring. Is nature about to burst forth? or has it already blossomed? The huge Winter 1 and the tiny Snows are the cold that freezes torrential streams, or maybe a sandbank on the coast of Normandy where traces of foam still stir in the breeze. Skin of the World 1 and 2 give an impression of bark, or the autumnal hide of an animal. Absence is that of water beneath the summer sun in a scorching heatwave.

Gradually Sabine Cibert builds compositions which take on an intimate feel as their surface is reduced, without diminishing in force. The main thrust of the first large formats dissipate, leaving only the vibration of colour and the sheen of light.

Thomas Leveugle

Art historian
Curator of the exhibition Paysages Bergerie de Sotteville-sur-mer
Flax and Fibre Festival 2024 – Normandy – France