EVI KELLERMATIÈRE-LUMIÈRE

[LIGHT-MATTER]

LIGHT, SPACE, TEMPORALITY

EVI KELLERMATIÈRE-LUMIÈRE

[LIGHT-MATTER]

LIGHT, SPACE, TEMPORALITY

info@evikeller.comwww.evikeller.com

© EVI KELLER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this document is prohibited by law.

Introduction

Prologue

Matière-Lumière / Texts and visuals

Exhibitions / Events / 2014 - 2017

Biography

INTRODUCTION

« Now that light is born from me and I am born from the light, the latter charges me to speak for it, to work for it… We met, thereby I was transformed so that the light is truly in me. »

Inspired by a writing of Shih T’ao, 1642-1707

LIGHT, SPACE, TEMPORALITY

In her transitional spaces, Evi Keller reveals, through an alchemical principle, a world of elements in the process of becoming, where light is amplified and vibrates, transfiguring her lived experiences.

Matière-Lumière crystallizes artistic approaches such as photography, painting, sculpture and audiovisual art, making explicit, among other things, their fusion and their rapport with light. Matière-Lumière consists of multiple and changing works, musical scores interpreted by light like veils floating outside their frames, which free themselves from space and the environment in which they were created. Transformed into healing veils, band-aids covering wounds and protecting abstract forms, they are the mysteries of a magical, living matter, which diversifies and refines itself in mineral, vegetal, animal and human forms, thereby giving birth to explosive, volcanic landscapes of a mysterious, faraway world.

To watch her works is to begin a journey between interior and exterior, between the infinitely small and the infinitely large. It is to live in a world where light travels through multiple layers of reflective surfaces until it becomes an abstraction that concentrates and distills all lived experience in order to find equilibrium in disequilibrium. It is also to receive a light made visible in its multiple forms in a present that includes all past and all future... It is finally to see it reflected and refracted by opaque, translucent worlds which dematerialize space and reveal to us our most profound inner selves. Its reflection in the wounds of the past allows us to perceive the meaning of chaos while maintaining its multiplicity and richness.

An auditory and visual poem, Matière-Lumière rises in a vertigo where day follows a long night, and where light, softly born from silence, liberates the soul in transparency, bursting the mirror.

Evi Keller in her studio, 2015, Paris.

PROLOGUE

MATIÈRE-LUMIÈRE

Evi Keller does not come from here, she went drilling and extracting where no one had ever dared go before, she buried her hands into the materials of the world, she traced time barefoot back to the first day when everything burst forth, she divested herself from all the contingencies of our blaring moment to patiently unpack our origins, from which each one of us definitively sprang. Evi Keller walked to these origins and came back noiselessly, her arms full of the treasures of the Earth. She created a world with the fragments of a crude light.

Matière-Lumière (Light-Matter) raises the veil on the unknown life, offers us the secrets of the world, allows the imperceptible whispers of Creation to resonate within us, warms us with its flickering light under the ice. The waves have their eyes closed in front of such vast Beauty. Telluric forces have bombarded the stones and the sun, knocking over the world forever. A few forgetful ones took it upon themselves to trample on the remains. But Evi Keller wanted to get closer to this Mystery that bears the features of infinite fragility and the light touch of children’s fingers, that projects us into the world’s memory. Like a water diviner, Evi Keller has enfolded miraculous Creations, large celestial draperies. Close to them, one feels death will never have any power where light accumulates stones.

These works carry within themselves bubbling indestructible matter, a tide of confidence capable of ripping itself away from the world to rise to new heights. We feel under our skin the astounding driving force of this light within us and between us, and its breathtaking thrusts into the dark. With Matière-Lumière, the entire universe suddenly gains more weight, more outline. The sap of the world reaches our own wrists. Its tawny colors, its stretches, its sensual revelations contaminate us from the inside and invigorate us to the tips. Draperies that resemble dances of suffocating and original beauty, their nature archaic and attractive, work like revelators of the world. The unspeakable, the deepest territories of our existence find their unhoped-for language. Matière-Lumière is a work of the deep sea, of supplications, the raw narrative of the world’s, and our souls’, combustion. With a deeply ingrained taste for the absolute, Evi Keller forges us a soul befitting the world we thought was lost.

Caroline Boidé

Matière-Lumière, untitled, studio view, Paris 2016.

MATIÈRE-LUMIÈRE WORKS / TEXTS AND VISUALS

SELF-EVIDENCE

Everything begins with a projection towards the light. In the video work Towards the Light, which in a way gives birth to all the material projections that follow, Evi Keller invites us on a spellbinding journey into the heart of a universe of luminous veins, organic breathings, magmatic swellings that spurt forth from the deepest points of light and matter in what could be (or could have been), in perfect synchrony, both our uterine and cosmic worlds. By blending the primal experience of our first existence and the other more remote, more intuitive experienceof the origin of the world, Evi Keller highlights and hides, through a 10-minute visual and auditory meditation, the self-evidence of the most complex mystery of all: that of the origin of all life, of all matter, which is to say that in the beginning, everything is light.

From this mystical impetus, personal and poignant, Evi Keller has extracted a series of magnificent photographs in sepia tones (sepia is, as we know, a tree with medicinal virtues), a precious collection of still images that invite the viewer to contemplation, to experience these «silent transformations» whose concentrated temporality leads us back to the intimate. After the astral experience of the video, these image-pictures appear to be so many pictorial meditations, where the dark light, from the depths of the composition, makes the other three elements - water, air, and earth - vibrate, like a Turner painting, in order to express the intimate story of their relationship with matter.

It’s the origin of the world. It’s also the origin of the work of the artist, and what is striking in the trajectory of Evi Keller’s work is its ontological, even ethical proximity to the enterprises of those artists - Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Chardin, Monet, Rothko, Soulages, Freud - who chose to eliminate any apparent subject from painting in order to make the very search for light-matter the subject of their quest, and thus the real subject of the work, by suggesting that it’s precisely there that we touch the essential.Here we arrive at the heart of history, which goes from the first magma to the most pregnant patterns of Nature, in particular the numerous evocations of trembling trees, those hyphens linking heaven and earth, in an essential verticality whose reflections in the water highlight the completeness at the same time as they undermine it, thus precluding any mystical certainty.

Triptychs / Triads / Trinities : third step in this sublime artistic quest, the works assembled under the title Light-Matter play in their turn on our dim, elementary sense of this «primordial» history, evoking this time a few traces of our human inscription thereon. By turns stained-glass window, tapestry, oriental rug, kingly coat or chasuble, shimmering of purple and black hues, Evi Keller’s veils of light, in their vital agitation, summon ourmost confused memories, the scariest and undoubtedly the most oneiric in our imagination, in starry triads: Cluny, Holbein, Aubusson ; Persianpalaces, the Doge’s Palace and the Papal palace; the dagger, the ring, the cell; the jugular, alchemy, the tomb; the bloom, the sparkle, the eclipse -- the black light.

And if the glimmerings give rise to fugitive appearances of lapis, saffron, ruby or silver hues, the viewer cannot escape for long the effect of the essential, organic, primary triptych of colors throughwhich Evi Keller molds the «light-matter» and attempts to give shape to the indissoluble link between the two: red, gold, and black. By puttingthese three densest of all colors into dialogue, with infinite, ever-renewing variations, Evi Keller places her enterprise under the triple sign of blood, light, and death.

For what gives life and death to matter is, indeed, light, without which it will remain inert. That is the artist’s and the poet’s vital work, without which we could never face this self-evidence.

Frédéric Ogée, exhibition «Matière-Lumière», Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, 2015.

(...) We are deep into the dark night. There is no more line to enter the church Saint-Etienne du Mont, place Sainte-Geneviève. The nave itself is plunged in shadows. A light at the very end of the transept gives it a medieval depth. On a giant screen set up in its choir, extended by a plastic tarpaulin on the century-old slabs, Evi Keller’s mineral visions unfold. The place is conducive to mysticism, as are these moving images. As if Turner had been making video. Or is it our eyes that, hallucinating with sleepiness, exacerbate the spectral beauty of these waters, these tree shadows, this moon, this flake tearings? Samson, son of Manoah, conqueror of the Philistines, who, thanks to his extraordinary strength, now carries the church’s enormous solid wood pulpit, seems to be the most surprised of all. His unfathomable gaze seems to give all this an unexpected meaning: a sleepless night like a challenge to the black night of time. Dawn isn’t far off.

Laurent Carpentier, Le Monde.

Nuit Blanche, October 4, 2014, Paris.«Une nuit blanche à marquer d’un coup d’aérosol»

Installation Matière-Lumière [Towards the Light - silent transformations], Nuit Blanche, 2014. © Evi Keller

Matière-Lumière (Towards the Light - silent transformations), 2010, series of 19 photographs. © Evi Keller

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-SC-16-0821, 2016, sculpture, 150 cm high.

MATIÈRE-LUMIÈRE [TOWARDS THE LIGHT - silent transformations]

Exhibition «Connected», Centrale for Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium, 24.03.2016-28.06.2016

Excerpt from an interview with the artist

(...) The video «Towards the Light - silent transformations», veritable cradle for the Matière-Lumière pieces, was born from my fusion with Light that dialogues with water, changing its state, which in its turn transforms light through multiple reflections.

It connects us to the vibration of the night, the symbol of the invisible, in a mysterious universe, that is unveiled through the rays of a submerged sun, emissary of far-away galaxies. It is a meeting between form and the nature of «things», between the visible and the invisible, between manifestation and mystery.

(...) This multiple-year encounter with frozen lakes under transformation, like passing through the mirror, has inhabited me and naturally guided me towards cellophane. An essentially contemporary artifact, it brings the viewer back to the Anthropocene Era. Cellophane is a magical material thanks to its fusion with the materials it covers, covering them with light, transmuting them into a whole that I call «Matière-Lumière». A disposable product, cellophane, mainly used in daily life as a means of protection and conservation, is thus transformed into a light shield, universal protection participating in the creative process.

In other «Matière-Lumière» creations I use superimpositions of inks, pigments, and cellophane layers. Here, the experience consists in transforming the audio-visual work into kinds of pigments that form deposits on the veil. In fact, the veil «Matière-Lumière» adds an infinity of possible gazes to the projected work through the reflection/refraction of light, and, by its singular geometry, as a unique sculpture, gives a signature to the moment. The phenomenon is close to the lamination of the photo-graphic silver film which is here transcribed into the translucent layers of the Matière-Lumière veils, as well as into the superimposition of the photographic shots of the video «Towards the Light - silent transformations».

(...) With a classical understanding of time, «Towards the Light - silent transformations», a fusion of painting and photography, preceded the appearance of «Matière-Lumière». However, the links between «Towards the Light - silent transformations» and Matière-Lumière can rather be understood as a back-and-forth between each other, a sort of spiraling time carrying successive transformations.

(...) The experience of black is consubstantial with the work as it maintains the intimate interaction between the work, the individual, and light.

[video: streaming version] http://www.evikeller.com/html/ek-ml-ttl.mp4[video: download version] http://www.evikeller.com/html/ek-ml-ttl.zip

Portrait of the artist, Centrale for Contemporary Art, Brussels, 2016.

« Osiris Sun of Night »

Excerpt of a poem by Zeno Bianu dedicated to Evi Keller

Osiris goes back up toward the surfacehe listens to the water running

through his bodyhe goes

from the beyond-birth to the beyond-deathin the perpetual poem

of inevitable lifeOsiris goes back up

in the cadenced backwashlistening to the pulsations

transmitted by his starwhat’s the weather like in deep waters

it’s a diamond-studded holding of the breath

( ... )

Projection of the audio-visual work Matière-Lumière (Towards the Light - silent transformations) on a Matière-Lumière veil. On the ground is another Matière-Lumière veil, black coal, survivor of fire, phoenix rising from its ashes.

The video has been purchased by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.

Exhibition «Matière-Lumière», Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, 2015.

Matière-Lumière [Towards the Light - silent transformations], n° 4817 and 4654, 180 cm x 180 cm. Exhibition «Kairos Castle», Gaasbeek Castle, Belgium, 2017.

Exhibition «Matière-Lumière [Towards the Light - silent transformations]», Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, 2015. © Evi Keller

http://evikeller.com/html/ek-ml-ttl-20160704.pdf

Matière-Lumière (Towards the Light - silent transformations), 2010, series of 19 photographs. © Evi Keller

Matière-Lumière, untitled, details. © Evi Keller

Close-up views of «Matter-Light» veils.

These photographic imprints are not taken in the real world as in «Towards the Light - silent transforma-tions», in which the work transforms the world into an imaginary universe.

Here, accompanying a dream at the deepest heart of the creation of «Matter-Light», they give birth to multiple materials, very real, created by the light.

In the landscapes of the work, matter becomes form, form becomes matter.

http://evikeller.com/html/ek-ml-empreintes.pdf

Matière-Lumière, untitled, detail. © Evi Keller

Matière-Lumière, untitled, details. © Evi Keller

The artist in front of Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-15-0921, 2015, 400 cm x 1160 cm.

(...) I would now like to address the difficult question of the static-shot presentation of the Matière-Lumière, whereas the changing lights create multiple works.

For this I chose to present a documentary work that illustrates how the light variations modify the perception of the work and, in the end, create it. In this video, the movement of the veil creates a complex light with reflected beams whose directions vary from place to place, playing a score that makes Matière-Lumière an infinity of works.

Excerpts from the lecture « THE MATTER BEYOND THE VISIBLE: JEAN DUBUFFET / EVI KELLER »,Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, June 2016.

[video: streaming version] http://www.evikeller.com/html/ek-ml-hk.mp4[video: download version] http://www.evikeller.com/html/ek-ml-hk.zip

Matière-Lumière, untitled, detail. © Evi Keller

THE QUEST FOR LIGHT, EVI KELLER’S “HOLY GRAIL”[La Gazette Drouot / The World of Art / Studio visit n*19 du 12 mai 2017]

The artist offers a unique approach, within the contemporary landscape, to the question of light. She opened the doors of her studio to us in order to initiate us into her “Matère-Lumière”. A journey beyond time.

By Stéphanie Pioda

One would rather imagine it deep in the midst of nature, in the heart of a forest or on the bank of a river, but no: Evi Keller’s studio is nestled in a private alley not far from the place de la République in Paris, sheltered from the rumble of the city. No sooner has one stepped in than one is thrust into an atemporal atmosphere, faced with the monumental veils of “Matière-Lumière” suspended on rails, welcomed by a sculpture in smudged white, part guardian of the place, part protector of the artist and her works. One half-expects it to come to life in order to ask us the riddle of the Theban Sphinx, so intriguing is its presence. A little bit further on, the flame of a candle flickers peacefully in front of a bodhisattva, adding a finishing touch to the studio’s contemplative spirit, accompanied by the rhythm of world music. It is within this magisterial space, bathed in light via grand bay windows, under 15 foot high ceilings, that the German artist (born in 1968) does her work.

After having studied art history, photography, and graphic design in Munich, Keller moved to Paris in 1994. She has dedicated herself fully to her art since 2000, but she first garnered major attention in 2014, following her installations at Saint-Etienne-du-Mont for the Parisian Nuit Blanche, and at the Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement during the YIA (Young International Artists) Salon hors les murs. There she presented her photographs and the video belonging to the series “Towards the Light—Silent Transformations”, one of the fundamental stages that led her towards her “Matière-Lumières”, as she calls them. They are studies of transitional states of matter, from solid to liquid states, from ice to water, or vice versa.

THE UNCERTAINTY OF PERCEPTIONThis concept already informed her installation Reconciliation in 2004: 81 screens showed one video evoking a heartbeat and drops of blood that melted ice. In Towards the Light, she seeks with her camera lens the exact moment when the surface of water transforms, ripples, or freezes, thus playing with the loss of one’s bearings. One doesn’t know anymore if one is looking at a reflection of trees in water, or a real or an imaginary landscape, or a superimposition of images which allow silhouettes to appear as if from nowhere. This hypnotic video, which resembles an internal voyage, was presented in 2015 at the Jeanne Bucher Gallery and at the Maison Européene de la Photographie in Paris, before joining theinstitution’s permanent video art collection.

The power of these images is particularly dazzling in “Kairos Castle”, at the Gaasbeek Castle in Belgium, where Keller produced them in a very large format. The magic of the juxtapositions conceived by curator Joke Hermsen—brilliant Dutch philosopher and woman of letters—reinforces the meaning of the works. A sculpture of Anthony Gormley, at the center of the room, features a dematerializing body, relaying, via a happy coincidence, the process of metamorphosis dear to Evi Keller and embodied in “Matière-Lumière”. These are veils of transparent film that can reach 16 meters in length—this meticulouswork gives the impression of seeing the terrestrial crust of a volcanic landscape, the surface of a metallic slab that would have been bowed, heated, and mangled unto the limits of its physical resistance, or the crystalline skies which arguably show a connection with Turner. The work is not fixed and, according to the lighting, might vary from a telluric planet to a vibrant blood-red heart to the immateriality of ether. “The light reinterprets unto the infinite the works which are modulable in space-time”, she reveals.

Keller leaves us in suspense, and the spectator, incapable of grasping the reality of her works, oscillates between an anchoring in matter and an opening onto the infinite. One’s perception gets blurred if one walks alongside them—the works start to ripple and float, so fluid and light is their support. One finds oneself in cognitive dissonance, as it is defined in social psychology, destabilized in front of all these contradictory pieces of information deciphered differently by the eye and the brain. These are perhaps the conditions for letting go and plunging into this body of work, which is so truly unique in contemporary art, and whose beauty and enchantment function just as well in the studio as in an exhibition hall or outdoors.

In 2016, a “Matière-Lumiere” flirted with an oak tree on the occasion of the “Sèvres Outdoors” show. “After five months on site it became a magnificent tree bark, a veritable communion with the elements, the sun, the warmth and the wind”. The work was not at all spoiled by the weather conditions, “to the contrary, it came close to a very important notion: it became nature. Art becomes sublime when it grows close to the creation of nature”.

THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM OF THE ALCHEMISTEvi Keller does not go into the secrets of her fabrication, but one can easily imagine the “canvas” in total transparency covering the floor, on which the artist would dance while scattering her pigments, impriso-ning the air, swelling the skin with a flame, rubbing and caressing it with her hand, using the paintbrush and the paint knife. “In my work transfigured by light I join ranks with Joseph Beuys, who touches me in several respects, in the quest for vital substance, in particular that of warmth”. Indeed, some of the sculp-tures of Beuys, who saw no difference between art and life, are nothing but flux, energy, and warmth. Like a shaman, Keller juggles the four elements to create a fascinating oeuvre akin to the alchemist’s dream: transforming lead into gold. However, the gold at stake here is not that of earthly riches, but of spiritual ones. We are lifted, guided by the precept engraved on the pediment of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: «Know thyself», which Keller would have replaced by «Become thyself”.This “voyage of initiation towards the light” of which she speaks is akin to the mental peregrination prac-ticed by the literati of Song China in their landscape paintings; but there, where the path is traced in order to climb up the mountain, it becomes multiple in Keller’s work, placed under the sign of liberty. It is meant, above all, to call upon all the senses, for the artist refuses to enclose her work within a discourse that limits it: each viewer is asked to make it his or hers, to plunge into the different spheres that open up. As when looking in a mirror, everyone recognizes themselves in it, instantaneously passing from microcosm to macrocosm.

The artist does in any case reveal to us that she sees her “Matière-Lumière” as “veils of healing,” an idea that one sees in her sculptures, a facet of her artistic research that she has recently begun. These silhouettes, suggesting a human presence, are, depending on the point of view, masculine or feminine, a duality that digs into the roots of Chinese philosophy and reflects a purely Janusian relationship with time. The plaster that fashions them also assumes the idea of transition of matter: from liquid it becomes solid when it dries. As for the word “plaster” (in French the same word is used for «plaster» and «cast»), it also invokes images of fracture, injury, care, and healing. In fact, once they are all present, these “guardians” will be covered by veils of “Matière-Lumière”. The quest continues.

Installation Matière-Lumière, Choices Gallery Weekend, 2017, http://evikeller.com/html/choices-2017-cp-en.pdf

Matière-Lumière, untitled, detail. © Evi Keller

Installation Matière-Lumière, 2017, http://evikeller.com/html/ml-gd-052017-en.pdf

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-16-0205, 2016, 300 cm x 930 cm.Exhibition «Question de peinture», Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, 2016.

Matière-Lumière, untitled, detail. © Evi Keller

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-14-0910, 2014, 134 cm x 224 cm.Exhibition «Matière-Lumière», Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, 2015.

Matière-Lumière, untitled, detail. © Evi Keller

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-14-0621, 2014, 360 cm x 423 cm.Exhibition «Matière-Lumière», Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, 2015.

When a veil is more or less transparent, the projection of light allows for a quasi-cosmic vision by its projection trough the veil onto a wall. The movement of the veil and the changing light make faraway galaxies emerge, bringing them out of their sleep.

Excerpts from the lecture « THE MATTER BEYOND THE VISIBLE: JEAN DUBUFFET / EVI KELLER », Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, June 2016.

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-13-0707, 2013, 134 cm x 224 cm x 10 cm. Base: 40 cm x 225 cm x 25 cm.Exhibition «Le contemporain dessiné», Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, 2016. © Evi Keller

Matière-Lumière, untitled, detail. © Evi Keller

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-13-0504, 2013, 230 cm x 320 cmExhibition «Matière-Lumière», Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, 2015.

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-14-0120, 2014, 133 cm x 73 cm.

Matière-Lumière, untitled, detail. © Evi Keller

Exhibition «Matière-Lumière», Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, 2015.

EVI KELLER, THE PHOTOGRAPHER WHO METAMORPHOSES LIGHT

Agathe Lautréamont, Exponaute / Enter into the work, July 4, 2016

Excerpt from the article

Imagine an artist who has decided to couple several artistic approaches to her interior world, constituted of contemplation, dreams and mysticism. You will arrive at a tentative description of the work of Evi Keller, a creator with one sole dream: to divulge all the secrets of light via her delicate, oneiric practice of photography— a discovery of a mind-boggling body of work between painting, engraving, and silver halide photography…

Matière-Lumière (Light-Matter). It is the title that Evi Keller gives to her photographic work. A name that sounds like an oxymoron, since matter is precisely what light is not, but rather a simple transport of energy. By the sole power of her imagination, can the artist, of German origin (but living in Paris since 1994), succeed in transcen-ding scientific limitations in order to attain a new artistic approach?

One would like to believe it, considering how much the photographic work she presents is endowed with this almost magical power to overwhelm our senses and bring us to sincerely ask the question: what does one see? The artist, who is represented by the Jeanne Bucher Jaeger gallery and whose work has been put in the spotlight by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and the Abbaye d’Auberive, likes nothing more than to solicit our sense of vision, and upset our perception of space, in order to make us penetrate another world: her own, where nothing is certain anymore.

In her photographs, perfumed by the unreal, Evi Keller puts us in suspense, in the face of an oeuvre that is difficult to define at first. Is it an abstract oeuvre, executed on a brass frame? Is it rather an engraving? An oil on canvas perhaps, teeming with details? None of that. The artist’s secret resides in the original choice of subjects, and in the even more surprising way of treating them. Equipped with her silver halide film camera, Keller ventures very close to streams, lakes and pools, in the heart of winter. Then, she directs her lens on the water frozen in the ice, in order to seize the reflection of the countryside above it in the frost. The result offers an inverted structure in a broken composition made as with thousands fragments of crystal, the whole represented in sepia tones.

One can see in it a glass broken by an angry fist or a metaphor for wrinkles that cover faces little by little, as time goes by, while the rest of the world remains, changeless, around us, indifferent to our tragedies. Evi Keller is truly fascinated by the play of shadow and light that silver halide photography reveals with such sensitivity. She builds around this play on perception a world imprinted with much mystery and charm, for a universe that pushes us to introspection. We slip into a reverie at the same time that we seek to make out the branches of a naked tree, or to define the point where the ice ends and the water begins.

The series of compositions entitled “Matière-Lumière” associate truth and fantasy, matter and immateriality. In her photographs, Evi Keller seeks to report on her devouring passion for nature. She is one of those artists that feels profoundly attached to the earth, to the mineral, the vegetal, to the fury as well as the delicacy of these parts of the world that are still preserved from the destructive madness of western society. (…)

The entire sleight of hand results in the artist’s amazing dealing with light. She permeates herself with it, she takes the time to let hours go by in order to observe how daylight interacts with ice, in order to better compose the photograph that will reveal another world, chimeric and unstable, into which one wants to plunge. It does not take long for our imagination to be set in motion and, as if we had been invited by Evi Keller’s talent, we begin to see beyond that which is shown (…)

Matière-Lumière (Towards the Light - silent transformations), series of 19 photographs.Exhibition «Courbet and Nature, Crossed perspectives». Centre d’art contemporain Abbaye Auberive, 2016. © Evi Keller

Matière-Lumière (Towards the Light - silent transformations), series of 19 photographs.Exhibition «Courbet and Nature, Crossed perspectives». Centre d’art contemporain Abbaye Auberive, 2016. © Evi Keller

Installation Matière-Lumière, Yia Art Fair, Hors Les Murs, Paris, 2014.

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-14-1004, 2014, 850 cm x 850 cm, Evi Keller in her studio, Paris, 2014.

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-13-0504, 2013, 230 cm x 320 cm, detail.Exhibition «Quinte-Essence,» Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, 2015.

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-SC-13-0321, 2013, sculpture, 150 cm high.

Once the raw substance has been reduced to its essence, it becomes the material of our own creation.

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-15-0921, 2015, detail © Evi Keller

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-15-0502, 2015, 430 cm x 420 cm. Sèvres Outdoors 2016. The artist in front of Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-15-0502, 2015, 430 cm x 420 cm, Sèvres Outdoors 2016.

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-15-0502, 2015

A Matière-Lumière creation has been installed by the artist in a process of fusion of the work and of a century-old tree, a tree of life, which links us to light, to the sky and to earth. Animated and inhabited by light and by the wind, the installation invites us to immerse ourselves in it and to further the creative process which the artist confided to the four elements of Nature.

(...) Matière-Lumière, born of nature, this installation embodies for the artist a vital gift to her initiatory source of inspiration. This is how the real and the imaginary, the exterior and the interior worlds are united until the dissolution of matter and time.

« SÈVRES OUTDOORS 2016 », Cité de la Céramique

[video: streaming version] http://www.evikeller.com/html/ek-sevres-outdoors.mp4[video: download version] http://www.evikeller.com/html/ek-sevres-outdoors.zip

Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-15-0502, 2015, 430 cm x 420 cm. Sèvres Outdoors 2016. © Evi Keller

EXHIBITIONS / EVENTS / 2014 - 2017

2014

NUIT BLANCHESaint Etienne du Mont,October 2014, Paris, France http://www.evikeller.com/html/ek-ml-ttl.mp4

YIA ART FAIR HORS LES MURSSaint Denys du Saint Sacrement,October 2014, Paris, France

2015

ART DUBAI 2015Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, stand D4 / Johara BallroomMarch 18-21, 2015, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

ART BRUSSELS 2015Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, stand 1B-21, Hall 1 April 24-27, 2015, Brussels, Belgium

CHOICES COLLECTORS WEEKENDEcole Nationale des Beaux Arts, group exhibition, May 29-31, 2015, Paris, France

MATIERE-LUMIEREGalerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, solo exhibition,May 30 - September 27, 2015, Paris, France

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER / EVI KELLERLecture cycle «Les Lumières de la Vie» Université Paris Diderot, September 2015, Paris, France

YIA ART FAIR HORS LES MURSMaison Européenne de la Photographie,September 9 - October 31, 2015, Paris, France http://www.mep-fr.org/evenement/matiere-lumiere/

FIAC 2015Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, stand E36 / Grand PalaisOctober 22-25, 2015, Paris, France

QUINTE-ESSENCEGalerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, group exhibition, October 17 - January 30, 2016, Paris, France http://evikeller.com/html/quinte-essence-2015-fr.pdf

2016

QUESTION DE PEINTUREGalerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, group exhibition, February 13 - April 16, 2016, Paris, France http://evikeller.com/html/question-de-peinture-2016-fr.pdf

ART DUBAI 2016Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, stand D4 / Johara BallroomMarch 16-19, 2016, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

LE CONTEMPORAIN DESSINÉ, Drawing Now Paris Hors Les MursMusée des Arts Décoratifs, group exhibition, March 17 - June 26, 2016, Paris, France http://evikeller.com/html/le-contemporain-dessine-2016-cp.pdf

CONNECTEDCentrale for contemporary art, group exhibition, March 24 - August 28, 2016, Brussels, Belgium http://www.centrale.brussels/expos/connected/

COURBET ET LA NATURE. REGARDS CROISÉSCentre d’art contemporain Abbaye Auberive, group exhibition, June 5 - September 25, 2016, Auberive, France http://evikeller.com/html/ek-ml-ttl-20160704.pdf

LA MATIÈRE AU-DELÀ DU VISIBLE: JEAN DUBUFFET/EVI KELLERMusée des Arts Décoratifs, lecture,June 16, 2016, Paris, France http://evikeller.com/html/ek-conference-jd-ek-2016-cp.pdf

SÈVRES OUTDOORS 2016Jardins de la Cité de la céramique à Sèvres, group exhibition, June 10 - October 23, 2016, Sèvres, France http://evikeller.com/html/ek-sevres-outdoors-2016-cp.pdf

FIAC 2016Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, stand 0.E34 / Grand PalaisOctober 20-23, 2016, Paris, Francehttp://www.fiac.com/fr/Paris/Galerie/Jeanne+Bucher+Jaeger-1092

DIALOGUE IXGalerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, group exhibition,October 1 - November 9, 2016, Paris, France http://jeannebucherjaeger.com/fr/exhibition/dialogue-ix/

2017

CORPS ET ÂMESGalerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, group exhibition,March 11 - July 1, 2017, Paris, France http://jeannebucherjaeger.com/exhibition/corps-et-ames/

CHÂTEAU KAIROSChâteau de Gaasbeek, group exhibition,April 1 - june18, 2017, Gaasbeek, Belgium http://www.kasteelvangaasbeek.be/en/events/73/kairos-castle-the-art-of-the-moment

CHOICES COLLECTORS WEEKENDMatière-Lumière Installation, 2017, [Co-]naissance / birth of three Matière-Lumière worksGalerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger20 mai 2017 - 3 juin 2017, Paris, France http://evikeller.com/html/choices-2017-cp-en.pdf

PASSION DE L’ART - Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger depuis 1925Musée Granet, group exhibition,June 3 - September 24, 2017, Aix-en-Provence, France http://www.museegranet-aixenprovence.fr/expositions/prochainement/passion-de-lart.html

BIOGRAPHY

Evi Keller is born in 1968 in Bad Kissingen, Germany. After studying Art History, Photography and Graphic Design in Munich in the 1990s, Evi Keller moved to Paris to work as a photographer. She created her studio in 2000, and since then she has dedicated herself exclusively to her art, collaborating regularly with dancers and contemporary musicians. In 2001 she began the series of installations The Worlds in Between that present an initiatory voyage into a world of unfolding elements. Imprints of a moment (sculptures, photographs, videos, sounds and paintings) bear witness to a process of transformation which is embodied and progressively transfigured in installations that the artist has described as transitional spaces. When passing through these spaces, in which time progressively dissolves, a dynamic conception of metamorphosis is unveiled and gives substance to abstract experiences dissociated from the reality of daily life. The Worlds in Between reveals a future in perpetual evolution, whose visible aspects seem to breathe and are never immobile. The work evolves through the lived experiences of the artist. In the transformation of these forms new vibrations are born. Her current creations, which she calls Matière-Lumière, are the culmination of this first cycle, and signal the beginning of a new form of art. Born from nature, Matière-Lumière crystallizes artistic approaches such as photography, painting, sculpture and audio-visual art, making explicit, among other things, their fusion and their rapport with light. At once contemporary and universal, they have neither references nor affiliation and emerge as a completely natural consequence of that voyage. Her being is reflected therein, opening a new cycle of creation. Matière-Lumière are multiple and changing works, musical scores interpreted by light like sails floating outside their frames - they free themselves from space and the environment in which they were created. A transformation through an alchemical process reveals explosive and volcanic landscapes of a distant and mysterious world, where light is amplified and vibrates. To look at Evi Keller’s works is to begin a voyage between interior and exterior, between the infinitely small and the infinitely large. It is to live in a world where light advances, traversing multiple layers of reflective surfaces, to an abstraction which concentrates and distills all lived experience in order to find balance in imbalance. It is also to receive a light manifested by its multiple forms in a present that includes all past and all future… It is finally to see it reflected, refracted by opaque and translucent worlds, dematerializing the space and revealing to us the deepest part of our own selves.

The Jeanne Bucher Jaeger Gallery organized a solo show Evi Keller / Matière-Lumière in the Gallery’s Marais space from May 30 to September 27, 2015. That same year, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie presented the photographs and audio-visual work Matière-Lumière [Towards the Light - silent transformations]; the work became part of the institution’s art video collection in May 2016. Matière-Lumière has been shown at the Centrale for Contemporary Art in Brussels and at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (March-June 2016), where a lecture was held on the matter beyond the visible in the works of Jean Dubuffet and Evi Keller. She has since been part of several group exhibitions.

The philosopher and curator, Joke Hermsen, had chosen two of Evi Keller’s major works for the exhibition «Kairos Castle» at the Gassbeek Castle in Belgium (April-June 2017). Evi Keller will also be part of the exhibition «Passion for Art: Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger since 1925» at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence (June-September 2017).