“Linda Sanchez’ work takes various forms: drawings, videos, sculptures, installations and performances, “joined up” by texts, notes and archives that document them almost systematically. Starting with a domestic environment, she experiments on bricolage and combinatory materials, everyday objects and gestures. She makes observations and hypotheses, and puts together protocols, endlessly renewing and modifying operations of construction and deconstruction. In a highly physical relationship to her work, she takes an approach whose modalities are similar to those of a scientific researcher. And this empirical dimension, which favours a methodical attitude and a constant activation of the eye, is articulated with a conceptual dimension that leans towards process and enunciation. Her stance does not fail to recall the spirit of certain literary works by, for example, Queneau, Borges or Pessoa, based on methodical, even obsessional, inventories, or variations in duly documented states of matter. They attain absurdity or fantasy, or a profound poeticisation of reality, as an extrapolation of an attempt to exist through passionate attention to what surrounds us. For Sanchez, abstraction is above all poetic and metaphysical. “I inhabit hollow spaces like a kind of nostalgia.” And the fact that the forms and objects remain “unformulated”, and often in precarious equilibrium, makes her all the more keen to set out the cartography of her experimentations. Repetitive concentration on gestures – the tension of nothingness – ends up by turning ennui into a game, and reconstructing certain small, imperceptible accidents. Sanchez’ strong sense of space and landscape also involves corporal encounters with elements and materials such as sand, wind and water (one thinks of Bachelard), as much as the mental reconstitution of entities, in a permanent focus on the relation of the part to the whole.”

From Corinne Guerci, “If there are flies, there must be spiders”, handbook for an exhibition at the IAC’s Galeries Nomades, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, Angle Art Contemporain, Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, 2007
Translated by John Doherty, 2014