Moments FITE 2016
Textile chronicles of the International Festival of Extraordinary Textiles
September 2016
Exhibition Roche-Bobois FITE 2016 Clermont-Ferrand – France
Moments series: Instants 1
Moments series, the latest stage in Sabine Cibert’s developing work, springs from Karl Hermann Haupt’s photographic research. A student at the celebrated Bauhaus school, between 1915 et 1920, Haupt worked on photo collages, experimenting on the effects created by lines of force, the relation beetween white and black or positive and negative. When perpective and landscape undergo such changes, the builiding turns into a cube, the road into an oblique line, the horizon a curve. To an advocate of the constructivist movement, the world is made up of simple forms and colors which are juxtaposed. In the course of the same years, Haupt achieved his « Farbstudien »– colors studies wich juxtapose plain colored squares parted by black orthogonal lines.
Starting from this photograhic montage of a duplicated road, Sabine Cibert preserve the reiteration of the motif inherited from old quilts but adds the vibration of light by reintroducing color. Each set of 13 squares by 21 offers a wide chromatic range with a great variety of armors, thus creating a pixelated image, diffracted as it were, a true echo propagating and bouncing back and forth.
With this rigid lines Sabine Cibert created and entirely moving and dynamic atmosphere. She has broken free from quilt technique and from classical compositions, and so moved into the world of the colorist. The cushioning of several textiles layers introduce an extra dimension and new lines of force. In short, this is a dynamic « Farbstudie » in three dimensions made possible by the materiality of the textile.
Thomas Leveugle
art historian, curator
September 2016