Slow light by Sandra Cattini, 2005

Children occasionally care to dismantle their toys, trying to understand their internal workings, to unearth their mystery - provided there is one. "What is it made of and how come I can't see it?" I didn't put this sort of question to Myriam Mechita, and I'm unaware if her approach really works along those lines. However, I like to think it does, since she believes knowledge is tributary of precisely this: taking apart, unravelling the core, laying bare the primary element from which everything else was constructed, or on which everything else rests. The foundation or keystone.

While in Dutch (historic) painting, the accumulation of objects in the image merely speaks of their use value, Myriam Mechita wants every stone in the edifice to acquire the value of an object proper, enabling a potential circulation from one to the other so as to assert the inner workings and the effort that brought forth the construction. No magic, just changes in scale - from detail to overview. If there is magic involved, it is enshrined in
the viewer's perception and his/her longing for illusion.

The constituting principle of Myriam Mechita's approach is that her drawings are constructed from discontinued lines, her wallpapers are made of thousands of patiently embroidered sequins, and her sculptures consist of encrusted pearls. Mass and matter are each time cast back onto the duplicated element that forms them.

Exposing each particle, along with every movement required in its articulation with the following, enhances the evidence of the proposed - mostly original rather than primary - forms and their brutal strength.

Incidentally, Mechita often stages antagonist forces: animal fights, a laser ray requiring the presence of fog to visualise the shape it sketches, or shadows and light; for instance, when she draws a skull by way of its shadows, visualising the invisible. Yet this movement is hardly ever fluid, and at best contradictory. Both Mechita's iconography and practice invariably display an insurmountable violence at work, a state of irresolution, which we are doomed to come up against eventually. Activities, which may otherwise be associated with laziness, like embroidering or assembling pearls, modest and ceaseless
gestures, carried out almost unconsciously, take on a wholly different meaning in Myriam Mechita's works. Mainly because the desire to finish the work, to complete this meticulous - and at times boring - task is palpable, one clearly distinguishes the artist's commitment to time and effort. The work doesn't come forth naturally - like a tree growing -, and every dot, every pixel is arduous proof of and declared longing for this circumstance. Failure to understand also means being incapable of assembling what is
scattered and stumbling over every part that forms it.

Myriam Mechita balances her work between the weightiness of implementation techniques, leaving the entire manufacturing process prehensible and visible, and the radiating glow that emanates from the whole, each work merging with the ambient light. Light thus becomes a constituting element of the work. Where everything was mere scattering and division, she conveys a fluid gesture, a variable element as fugitive as a breath. Her works are made to interact with light since every unity that constitutes them is designed to capture and reflect light. Mirroring effects, sparks of light, reflections and luminescence are the raison d'etre of the pearls, the sequins, the cast and mirror-polished aluminium, or the fluorescent painting. The dazzling effect they produce allows the work to shift from division to fusion, from assemblage and collage to drawing. Indeed,
Mechita's objects are the result of an assembling process rather than sculpture, and her wallpapers or painted surfaces (among others, a portrait of the mother and daughter comes to mind, made of glue mixed with sequins applied on the reverse side of a table) are more akin to collage than to painting. Light becomes a homogenizing factor, similar to the binder required in painting to obtain a mixture of pigments.

In this shift from labour to aura through light, time inscribes itself like a watermark. Each of Myriam Mechita's pieces - each a true Penelope work -, in its very process, evokes fleeting time, yet time is brought to a standstill in the completion of the object on display. Infinite time is suspended in view of the work's aura. A meditation on vanity, it merely
deals with the fragile reconciliation of opposites: of decoration and transcendence, futility and metaphysics, meaning and body weight.
Sandra Cattini
March 2005

Translation: Boris Kremer