Which doors allow us to enter into the world, to read it? How may we view our relationship to what we assume is One, to that in which we take part as an element and come up against in order to say something about it? Aristotle made imitation into an art form: To copy reality is both to read it and to write it.

The images – meaning drawings and sculptures here – that Lucie Chaumont displays before us introduce the redeeming distance: the dual stance of being in the world and keeping the world at gaze's length. The necessary standpoint from which this exchange with the world can reveal itself is in its singularity here: Living there is to read what surrounds me. Thus everyday life and the individual induce the world. This singularity is not subject to the unifying and all-encompassing Oneness of theory; on the contrary, a singularity founds universality.

Lucie Chaumont is not a philosopher but an artist, in the archaic sense of the word: the hand-tool reads, and she makes. Her thinking is a means of doing that proposes representations of the world: not presentations, intended violence or pornography leaping out at us from the screen. All her skill and art are marshalled for the purpose of imitation. What is represented in her images? Technique itself. It is the technique that is represented here, the reading hand...

Lucie Chaumont does not seek to leap out from the screen; rather, she reveals it by means of a tautology: showing – i.e. indicating through imagery – then repeating. But this process does not imply immobility, for in the moment of the said again, a shift takes place. “At the mine” is a large-scale drawing of a scientific diagram representing a cross section of a mine at the earth's surface, drawn with a graphite lead ¹ pencil. The title, the motif and the instrument echo each other. This represented mine enables the extraction of the graphite which is used to make the drawing of the mine... Like a snake that misses biting its own tail: it is chasing a signifier – always the same one, mine – that purports to present itself; and always different since with each new round the tone changes. The signifier itself creates the link between the object – i.e. the image – and the instrument. The ordinary disc of everyday life quietly revolves, without a hitch, and the passage from one tone to the next happens naturally. These moments of salience and passage are put into play in Lucie Chaumont's drawing, thereby revealing the possibility of another meaning.

The viewer can already perceive that the point of reference is the Real; what must move are the eyes of the body and of the mind. And saying again translates into doing again: “Pizza, 1 personne” ² – the cardboard copy of a pizza box – includes the instrument which prevents the packaging from falling onto the food... In the same way, the series of drawings entitled “Files d'attente” ³, cut to scale in the shapes of waiting room tickets, impairs the need to regulate traffic in a consumerist society and the senselessness of a handmade instrument that only mass production demands. The handmade aspect implies the notion of 'one by one', i.e. singularity, or a signature, as so many elements that fade away into the mass of the all-industrial and globalizing. These contact points between singularity and industry's need to rationalize and deal in mass, to annihilate the isolated foyers of personal initiative (Artaud) are what Lucie Chaumont captures here.

But the point is not to put forward a cosa mentale gesture – that would place us within the logic of assisted ready-made. Art is taken here in its archaic acceptance: the technique and know-how are the remit of the artist. Thus, the ultimate deviation of “Nuancier” ⁴ : drawn in pencil, the piece asserts itself as a manual canvas of a spectrum of greys... Outside of its original realm (the printer) and transposed to another technique, the object reveals its limits: a useless instrument. The term colour chart refers to its nature but the object is stripped of its work value. A new shift occurs when Lucie Chaumont decides to send it back into its world (the world of printing and reproduction) by realizing a silkscreen edition of it. The mechanical canvas of the screen blends with the manual canvas, the unique object thus becoming a manufactured product that forbids any recourse to utilitarianism. This foliated – once again, a reference to mineralogy which greatly occupies the artist – craftsmanship (handmade), industrialism, usage and meaning; each layer comes as a counterpoint to the preceding one without masking it. On the contrary, the foliation reveals the significant and coloured nuances of our grasp of reality: what colour does the colour chart take on with each change of tone?

“Parpaing” ⁵ presents itself in its solid utilitarian beauty. Obviously, we are not dealing here with a ready-made: the artist's and technician's skills come together to produce this ceramic piece (as was the case with “Nuancier”). The indication of solidity suffices, one need only to believe in it; if one were to test it the piece would splinter into pieces. What is presented here is the Breeze Block, number zero. This origin reveals of course the myth that Lucie Chaumont has been recounting in reverse. Her starting point: the industrial and manufactured object are the foundation for the fiction she is constructing, a fiction that results in the prototype or origin that should have enabled the multiplication. In a short piece, Antonin Artaud accused Boucicaut (founder of the department store Le Bon Marché) of unleashing “over the world a flood of ugliness and of poisoning the aesthetic health of the general public. [...] A piece of furniture is built to a useful end and may only abandon its very strict attribution to the extent that it offers an undeniable artistic and aesthetic quality. The simplest pine wardrobe [...] would be a thousand times more beautiful than the mass-produced pedestal by the Bon Marché”. Lucie Chaumont's response to mass production is an ironic nose-thumbing. The object, taken out of its strict attribution and thus losing all functional uses acquires beauty.

This is not the work of a falsifier but a copyist. The repetition of what is similar but refuses to be the same, the art of copying sustains itself on the (minimal?) tension of the metaphor: to do again without allowing the subjective trace of the artist/artisan to lose itself in industrialization. Shifts and gaps blend in with one another with great subtlety. Her series of plaster casts, “Empreinte écologique” ⁶, that could be viewed as copies of the innumerable objects that society produces in large amounts for a very short usage period before they are relegated to trash (plastic cups, fast food wrappers, etc.) accumulate what does not take up any space: traces. Only the image in volume of each object that was once filled with plaster is left, an image that cuts out for itself in reality the space occupied by the object itself, now absent. On the screen of reality, its reverse appears: the piece of waste is hidden away from sight; once taken out of its strict attribution, the image reveals its brilliance. A desire to emphasize contemporary society's refusal to face its waste products, its attempt at moving them off territory to the periphery, is evident. To make do with what is left over, in the way of natural processes, to leave remains, a pearl. “Extraction fossile”⁷ is composed of two elements: a lithographic print and a drawing etched into a stone and then printed – historically, the invention of lithography paved the way for industrial printing. The motif (an extraction quarry) comes as the counterpoint to a pencil-drawn lithographic stone (not printed) that reveals what it could contain: the traces of vegetal waste – a fossil. The origin and the finality merge while the tool (the stone) indicates its own use: to bear the traces.

In this repeated interweaving of signifier, object, image and the threads of industrial production and consumerism, of craftsmanship and art, the appearance of the urban periphery cannot be seen as a coincidence. If Living there denotes the gap between the flat (in the city) and the studio (at the periphery), the phrase undergoes the very treatment that is the singularity of Lucie Chaumont's work. The journey is undertaken in reverse, from the city (where one lives) to the periphery (where one works). Once again, it is the trace that she chooses to show: the pencil tracing in the series entitled “Lotissement”⁸, and the route followed from one point to another. On the screen, the lull – discounted – represented by the journey. This is not a journey that calls for reverie and the dilation of time and space, but rather what society wants to compress and shorten: travel time. Roundabouts formally repudiate the affirmation that the shortest route between two points is a straight line. To go around in order to go straight ahead has become the rule. This rule cannot be sacrificed to profitability; it is the bedrock of the solitary walker who dreams the world as he narrates it:

“My dreams are multiplied
by the stories to live and the sayings to hear.
I bring you the child of a bitumen night,
the wing is phosphorescent and the shadow, illuminated
by these reflections of truths.”

(Raymond Queneau)