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Landscapes
Sabine Cibert ● Contemporary Textile Art

Flax and Fibre Festival

5-7 July 2024.
La Bergerie – Sotteville-sur-Mer – Normandy

“I want to create a finished painting, a painting that is not fragmented, a complete painting […] You won’t see how the colours are put together […] they will be there with the same principles as always, but you won’t see how they pass from one to the other. ” ¹

In 1912, Robert Delaunay began the Window series, in which he deconstructed the panorama beyond the walls of his studio. The landscape was now technically no more than a juxtaposition of colours and contrasts perceived simultaneously, all at once.
Following in the footsteps of the Delaunays, Sabine Cibert creates works that are nothing but colour, with textiles as their only material.

Thousands of squares patiently collected, prepared and assembled. Textiles are characterised not only by their architecture, their weave, but also by their own colour. From this fragmentation, she creates compositions that border on abstraction, where the eye tries to work out how to move from one colour to another.

What does Sabine Cibert deconstruct and reconstruct through colour? Perhaps landscapes too. But like Maria Helena Vieira Da Silva, a central figure in abstract landscape painting, hers are as much in front of our eyes as they are inside us.

All these compositions are identical, apart from a few technical details – textile squares patiently assem- bled by hand and then sewn together – but they are all different. Like a unique landscape that changes with the seasons, like contradictory emotions that arise in the same spirit and then disappear.

In Paysages, Sabine Cibert presents a series of ten works that are like panoramas unfolding the cycle of the seasons and of plants. It’s a technical trick to turn multiple, antinomic textiles into a fragile unity. There are few clues to the original motif. But does it even exist? This slow work is also about the passage of time before our eyes: the cycle of the seasons.

Dawn evokes the moment when everything seems to change. The colours are like changing lights, as if at the beginning or end of spring. We don’t yet know whether nature is about to blossom or whether it is already in full bloom. The great Winter 1 and the little Snows are the cold that has frozen the water in the torrents, unless it is a sandbank on the Normandy coast where a few scums survive, animated by the breath of the wind. The skins of the world are like the bark of a tree or the flank of an animal in autumn. Absence is the absence of water under the scorching summer sun.

Little by little, Sabine Cibert builds compositions that become more intimate, reducing their surface area without losing their force. The main lines of the first large formats tend to disappear, leaving only the vi- bration of colour and the iridescence of light.

Thomas Leveugle

Art historian
Curator of the exhibition “Paysages” Bergerie de Sotteville-sur-mer

Flax and Fibre Festival 2024 – Normandy – France

Photographs

1. Sonia Delaunay , Interview with Pierre Dumayet, “Le temps de lire”, ORTF, 1972. in Sonia Delaunay, les couleurs de l’abstraction, Anne Montfort and Cécile Godefroy (eds.), Paris Musée, 2014, p. 275.

Translation Fibre and flax festival Alix Thomaso