Prudence Dudan
At the beginning, there is the page. Filled with words and images, it is never blank. Prudence Dudan marks it according to her mood: monotype, drawing, painting, collage... The choices are numerous, the gestures precise. They conceal as much as they reveal the original content, which says something other than what was disguised. Clouds pass in front of a Greek goddess, a dune covers a Spanish vase, grasses escape from a Thai fish trap.
Prudence Dudan collects beautiful vintage books on a variety of subjects, from boxed cooking to paintings by Courbet. Each provides her with a repertoire dense enough for mind and hand to warm up, finding in the repetition of motifs and the loosening of gestures the means for a kind of exercise—an active form of reading. The effort is minimal because pleasure prevails, and things come together by chance, like arranging a bouquet. Prudence Dudan improvises.
Working in series and in color, she teases the surface of borrowed materials with the playfulness of Baldessari and the joy of Matisse. Her free associations divert attention, and the subject of study, removed from its context, no longer informs in the same way. Only the whole provides meaning, which slips through her fingers, from the literal to the figurative.
Tired of being seen from familiar angles, plants, chairs, glaciers, forks, seashells undergo a metamorphosis. Ultimately, her parallel encyclopedia enters the realm of dreams.
Virginie Huet
Prudence Dudan was born in 1985 in Paris. A graduate of the Decorative Arts school (Ensad) and Sciences Po Paris, she is passionate about images, words, and books. She traveled to India, then to New York, where she was invited to take part in a year-long residency at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, an art center dedicated to the book arts.
While her work had already explored the book as an object, the poetic perception of the world, and reading in its broadest sense (reading text, images, objects, sound, but also situations and living things), it was there that she began to intervene directly on the books she collects.
Upon returning to Paris, she collaborated with magazines such as Air France Magazine and M Le Monde while continuing her research. The books she works on reflect her daydreams, covering subjects such as the endless landscapes of American national parks, seas and oceans, the art of ikebana and bonsai, Greek and Roman statues, 1970s Italian furniture, modular kitchens, Mediterranean architecture, Spanish craftsmanship, and the painting of Titian or Gustave Courbet…
Page after page, paintings, drawings, fragments of photographs, and pieces of fabric come together to reconstruct a story—shedding light through form and color.