Caroline Gallois

A monograph by Giuliano Serafini has recently been published on the much travelled, Saigon-born, French painter and printmaker Caroline Gallois, who now lives in Florence. Caroline Gallois: Bersaglio mobile/Cibile mobile (Florence, Ed. Polistampa, 2008, pp. 85 col. And 33 b. & w.ills., €32) reveals how after initially studying Economics and Political Science in Paris, she returned to the far east to pursue her interest in dance. Her artistic career began in Mexico in the early 1980s, where she studied first in the studio of Javier Anzuries and then at the Escuela di San Carlos in Mexico city, with a short interlude in Paris. Initially Caroline’s world was that of the Mexican muralists, particulary of Tamayo and Orozco. Serafini stresses the importance of dibujo – drawing for her. This stood her in good stead when she begun to make prints while studying intaglio printmaking and lithography at the Art Students League in New York between 1991 and 1996.Gallois subject matter included Etruscan sarcophagi and sculpture. In 1994 she made a series of aquatints of birds in flight titled Birdict, which Serafini associates with surrealism. In her early New York paintings there are echoes of Matta, and her frequent motif of a bicycle seems likely to have been in part inspired by Oscar Dominguez. Serafini also sees in these prints a return to the black-drawing of her time in Mexico City. Gallois worked in etching and soft-ground as well as in aquatint before turning in 1997 to monotype, a technique in which she made many works over the next three years. She had left New York in 1996 and eventually settled in Florence. Her husband is the architect and theoretician, Vittorio Giorgini, who taught at the Pratt School of Architecture. In Gallois’s Figuiers she adopted a gestural semi-abstraction in which birds form can be barely discerned. Sometimes collage is incorporated. In the 1998 series Arno the letters of the river accompany representation of Florentine palazzi and towers and less decipherable forms. To create these she pressed linoleum plates onto paper and onto lead plates. These grey and black monotypes where succeed the following year by En-visageons-Florance, a series of female head-like forms derived from a stylised plan of the city. Later that year Gallois executed Variations sur le Phares based on Baudleaire’s Les fleurs du mal, in which her use of invented stonemasons like inscriptions and photographic images of works of art bring to mind the Italy based Joe Tilson, as well as Rauschenberg, whose name is frequently invoked by Serafini. The banding and insistent rectilinearity in paticular are comparable with the ideas of the English artists.The geometric composition of the Baudelaire prints where followed by carborundum etchings of great freedom devoted to Dante’s Divina Comedia, which included collages insertions of digital photographic images and drawings in close imitation of Old Masters. More recently she has added gaufrage to the armoury, dry printing various materials on to her mono types. This practice of insertion is also adopted in her latest pictures, in which figurative drawings are incorporated into pale abstract encaustic paintings.