On view artworks realized from 2019 to 2024
Almost liquid motions ripple, bend, curve, and arch the white Carrara marble. A breath, a shudder, a shiver, a sway and from the material emerge moments of being, in sculptures that animate the exhibition space of the Galata Museo del Mare in Genoa, in the show “Sulle onde in cerca della libertà”, curated by Luciano Caprile.
Many white waves and a Vague noire, a wave formed in black Zimbabwean granite: lightness and strength blend
The artist, Louise Durocher, a Canadian architect and sculptor, works in Pietrasanta. Her architectural training took her from Montreal to Paris, where working with multicultural design teams led her to broaden her intellectual horizons. A daughter of the arts, her mother is a painter, she has drawn since she could hold a pencil, sculpted since she was eleven, and began writing poetry at fourteen. She has exhibited in Seattle, New York, Montreal, Armenia, and Pietrasanta. Her works are held in collections in Canada, France, Japan, and the United States. A few lines can only sketch the outline of her artistic journey, but her words offer glimpses into her personality: “I am a physical being, I live in a three-dimensional world both inside and outside my body. I wander through my mind imagining spaces, objects, and the emotions they provoke. I see the light that surrounds them, I feel the breeze that moves through them, I breathe the scent they release and imagine them in homes, among gardens, loved by people”.
The sea is a stage for journeys of hope made by people who have none in their homeland
After many years of sculpting softer stones such as alabaster and soapstone, she discovered Carrara marble in 1995 in Pietrasanta, where she spends part of the year when not in Seattle. Her studio is a “creative epicenter for works that are physical, tactile, and emotional.” She creates monumental sculptures, where scale is functional to the emotional communicative power of the work. “Art is the continuous rhythm of my life”.
The subject of the Genoa exhibition is the sea, the sea “that inspires and hypnotizes”, reflected in a flow of works spanning from 2019 to 2024. Many white waves and a Vague noire, a wave formed in black Zimbabwean granite. Lightness and strength blend. The flowing, ever-metamorphosing aquatic moods of marble mirror the vulnerable navigation of body and soul through life. The sea becomes a stage for journeys of hope made by people who have none in their homeland. It is the road to freedom for migrating populations fleeing catastrophe, tragedy, and unimaginable abuses. It is a road that may become a grave. It is yearning and it is drama. “Body of water”, writes Durocher, the sea is the great mother who envelops, embraces. “No matter how threatening and uncertain the journey one faces”, the sea lights the last candle: Hope. In the fragments of marble are engraved transformations and wounds, mysterious, relentless signs of impermanence, the only certain destiny of being and existence.
The flowing of aquatic moods of marble becomes the vulnerable navigation of body and soul through life
