Irina Rasquinet

Irina Rasquinet comes from Chechnya — from the crossroads of cultures between the Black Sea and the Caspian, from lands where the wound of war is something you carry and silence is a language. From the Caucasus she has kept a steep soul, a taste for paradox and for freedom. And a deep desire to bring light into what is austere.

Art is her soil: her way of putting down roots while working on the invisible. Hence her elemental relationship with nature, through canvases, sculptures and magnified jewels. With Mine d'or, giant wooden pencils with sharpened leads stand like a harrow, proof that the poetic knows how to hone itself. With Le Kobold et le Kleptomane, the reign of the heteroclite conspires to colonise a tree trunk and set it ablaze.

Branches torn off by storms, she makes them glitter. Their shadow is covered in crystals, a dreamlike lichen that lends life to the inanimate. Then light can play. Turning a fragment into a talisman, a sheet of paper into a continent, the tiniest thing into a shimmer: this is how she asserts the radical transmutation of art.

Each work is rooted in the powerful soil of the imagination, where dream meets earth. Art becomes an epiphyte, taking nature as its support, like an orchid. It is a way of contaminating the world in order to re-enchant it. Irina Rasquinet says she "goes toward the astonishing, and the astonished" — toward a freshness from before the rupture, crystallised by a stolen childhood.

Hence the insolence of orange, that bonfire colour, that energy shouting: "Rise." Awakening is surely the key to her art. Awakening of matter, awakening of the world, a jolt of consciousness to repair what has been forgotten or damaged. For beauty is the coupling of grace and the sacred.

— Ingrid Astier — translated from the French