Tatiana Trouvé, Le grand atlas de la désorientation @ Centre Pompidou

Tatiana Trouvé, The Guardian, 2022

I am such a fan of Tatiana Trouvé's The Guardian sculptures that I would travel around the world to see one of these quietly, contemplative chairs resting in a corner of an exhibition. The handful included in the current Pompidou exhibition are gorgeous. It is all I can do to stop myself sitting down, sinking into a wicker seat to rest my weary legs. As I stand there, I want to rifle through the open bag on the chair, throw the cardigan around my shoulders and read the interesting books. That is, having cleaned away the cigarette box used as an ashtray to make way for myself on the seat. 

Tatiana Trouvé, The Guardian, 2022

In the Pompidou exhibition, as always, The Guardian examples sit quietly, unassumingly, at the edges of the room, to the side of the other works. I waited and watched other visitors, only to see them ignore the seats filled with someone's belongings. They chairs are so understated and discrete, to the point where they don't ask to be looked at like art works. And yet, they are art works. They are intricately crafted from bronze, marble, onyx, brass and sodalite. The sculptures are fascinating and inviting when we recognize the work that has gone into making hard, inflexible materials into lusciously soft fabrics and objects. 

Tatiana Trouvé, The Guardian, 2022

The sculptures are also compelling because they are simultaneously life like and not. Their placement against the wall, aside from the other works makes them appear to me as if they belong to the attendant who has just slipped out for a moment. There is always a book, a bag, a personal item, usually cast in sensuous marble, sitting on the seat. They show more than the traces of human presence, tell of beings more real than ghosts of the past. These are the chairs of people who have just popped out, with all the signs of "I'll be back" left on the seat. They speak of an immanent presence. They are also about the people and things that are invisible: the sculptures themselves are invisible to some visitors, as if they are or were occupied by an invisible guard, those tireless museum workers whose presence allows us to be in the company of fragile art works.

This exhibition also includes a wall of Trouvé's lockdown drawings that she made on the covers of the world's leading newspapers. Trouvé draws her bed, her dog, her wardrobe, her everyday life in her studio over the top of the dramatic headlines that accompanied us through the months from March to May (2020). The superimposition of the everyday over the devastating news of death and disease, the recounting of numbers and alarming headlines often acting as warnings, makes obvious sense. This is how we all lived in lockdown; our ordinary lives and a world in crisis outside our doors overlaid each other for months on end. As I browsed the warnings of war, death knells and governments on their knees, I was astounded at how far away it all seemed. When I think about how consumed we all were by statistics, masks, government restrictions, and vaccines, and yet, today, most days, it doesn't even cross my mind that we are not even one year out of a global pandemic.