The Sea Paintings series is central to the work of Jessica Warboys. Her generally large-scale paintings exist at the crossroads of ritual, performance and artistic process, three important elements driving this young artist’s work.
Warboys executes these series directly outdoors in the countryside, specifically on the English seaside, where the artist lays out her canvases on the beach. The combination of pigments and the wind and waves has yielded this tangible result. This process has ties to performance and the improvisation of gestural painting, and is similar to the way Warboys creates her videos, in which the narrative is revealed in time with the editing, like a puzzle.
In the space Warboys is showing on a single screen a trilogy that is made up of two recent films and a new piece. La forêt de Fontainebleau (Fontainebleau Forest, 2010), Marie de France (2010) and Victory Park(2011) are three self-contained films that form a triptych for this exhibition. Only one of the three is a sound film. The British artist reads a poem by the 12th-century poet Marie de France, who, like Warboys, lived between London and Paris.
The three films take place outdoors, in either a setting that has been laid out by man, as in the landscape park of Victoria Park, which dates from the 19th century, or in a natural area that is relatively untouched, such as the forest of Fontainebleau, long a favorite of landscape painters (the School of Fontainebleau, for instance). Occupying the center of the triptych, Marie de France consists of a subtle mix of an outdoor setting, a lushly growing meadow, and an indoor one.
In each part of the trilogy, the body is fragmented, as the camera focuses on the legs and arms of the two female characters.
Warboys creates mysterious, poetic, ritualized film scenarios.
At the heart of her work, legends and other founding myths are powerfully evoked, especially through her manipulation of objects. The recurrent object most often seen is the mirror, archetypal and timeless. It allows her to slyly reproduce the visual in the visual, and is a metaphor of painting and optical tricks. It is simply a producer of images.

Claire Le Restif

Jessica Warboys’ show À l’étage (Upstairs), runs from 24 March to 5 May 2011 at the Maison d’art Bernard Anthonioz (Nogent-sur-Marne) as part of the external program of the Jeu de Paume, Paris.