Young artists are often too eager to please, and they regularly overstate their cases. “La Reprise,” Emilie Pitoiset’s first-ever solo exhibition, does the opposite. Pitoiset has the confidence—that is, the grace—to let her viewers come to her, and never says too much. A cursory visitor to “La Reprise” might linger on certain more obviously seductive moments (maybe Othello, a video of a horse being forced to the dirt by a man with a pistol, or the fine taxidermic bird Handy, both 2007) but otherwise find the exhibition, especially the paintings and sculpture upstairs, somewhat underwhelming—or rather, too diffuse. But the more one becomes aware of Pitoiset’s sensibility, which has to do not only with the relationship between man and beast (specifically, the triangulation of man, woman, and beast by means of force) but also equilibrium and balance more generally, the more everything resonates and calmly unfolds: What begins downstairs with figuration repeats as abstraction upstairs, so that the fall of the horse or the bent heads of the collared human-animal hybrids in drawings on the ground floor are clarified, reiterated, and transmuted one flight up by the paintings and especially the large steel sculpture Sur la Pointe en équilibre (Balanced on a Point), 2007–2008, which blocks the window and thus serves as an unequivocal finale. One could point to other similarly subtle and rewarding progressions throughout, and the downstairs wall text, cribbed from J. G. Ballard, comments on the show as progression, thereby anticipating a viewer’s response. Like Stéphane Mallarmé—whose white pages are recalled in the whiteness of the paintings and in the silence between the sounds of the hammer-blows and the pistol shots—Pitoiset’s poetry is best located in the places where nothing is said, in the spaces in between.
