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108
Claudia Comte, Cecilia (interview painting), 2021

Chapter: Ulysses - Narration and Identity

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Reduced structures, musical lightness
Comte’s monochrome “interview paintings,” rendered in pastel colors—pink, mint green, and light blue—are covered with minimalist graphic line patterns: rhombuses, zigzags, circles, and serpentine lines reminiscent of winding mountain roads or racetracks. They could be cutting templates or reduced, almost architectural structures seen from a drone high in the sky or on a screen: lines across fields, circular basins or silos, or simply fragments of diagrams. At the same time, these images possess an almost musical lightness, evoking notations and compositions.

Interviews with prominent actors
When you move closer, however, you notice bands of words from which sentences flash out: “We see the disappearance of species” or “Because I didn’t know what to do after getting a degree.” Within the geometric, ornamental patterns, these bands of text are repeatedly cut off, crossed, or twisted into circles, as if the words had no semantic content but were simply material from which lines and patterns are formed. In fact, the text material consists of excerpts from interviews that Comte conducted over fifteen years with prominent curators, including Hans Ulrich Obrist and Koyo Kouoh, the recently deceased artistic director of the Venice Biennale, as well as Cecilia Alemani, who directed the 2022 Biennale. The painting Cecilia in the exhibition is dedicated to her.

Images of networks
The fact that the titles consist only of first names alludes to a habit within the art world of referring to internationally known figures by their first names alone in order to signal familiarity and insider knowledge—“of course, Hans Ulrich!” Comte’s images can therefore be read either as abstract portraits of these individuals or as representations of a network. These insider structures of the art world fit neatly into Comte’s minimalist cosmos, in which entire landscapes, trees, and plants are reduced and abstracted into patterns, waves, and icons.

Abstract language patterns
Comte often works with sculptures in the landscape: smoothly polished wooden branch forms and concrete cacti, which she sometimes submerges in the sea, reducing them to an underwater desert. The shifting patterns that inspire her arise equally from nature and from a society shaped by digital experience, and she transforms them into environmental installations, some of them monumental in scale. Comte’s works address contemporary issues such as climate change, ecology, and global pollution. At the same time, they are frequently the result of meditative, artisanal, and conceptual processes in which the artist recycles materials and “translates” them into new formal contexts, much like these conversations from the ecosphere of art, which appear here as abstract language patterns.

Audio

Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.

Claudia Comte, Cecilia (interview painting), 2021
Acrylic on canvas, plexiglas plaque, coloured pencil on paper in plexiglass
© Claudia Comte. Photo: Conradin Frei
Written Art Collection

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