image nature morte v4 | 2015 image les campagnes hallucinées | 2018-19

je ne connais pas l’Afrique | 2011

On the occasion of the contemporary art course on the theme of Africa, Blandine Galtier is looking for ways to evoke this continent, very present in its family tree but of which it ignores almost everything. To avoid the pitfall of fantasies or clichés, she engages in a methodical exercise of overflight of the territory and cartography, punctuated by the representation of the main international airports of African countries. After observing the aerial views gleaned from Google Earth, the artist notes the diversity of colors and the graphic shape of the landing strips. Each of the views has the same scale, the same orientation and their dimension will be systematically 10×25 cm or 20×25 cm if the airport shown is larger. The highlighting of the strange shapes of the tracks and carried out by the deep bite of the plates creating the embossing of the paper. From each aerial view chosen, two colors are selected and associated with reference to African batiks. The embossing of the tracks and cities left blank, recalls the scarifications practiced by certain ethnic groups. This simplification results in almost abstract works.