Matière-Lumière raises the veil on the unknown life

By Caroline Boidé

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.

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.
Matière-Lumière, untitled, ML-V-15-0502, 430 cm x 420 cm, Sèvres Outdoors, Cité de la Céramique, 2016.