L’art d’Aude Herlédan c’est d’abord le rapport à la matière. Elle l’approche, la séduit, la prend pour tenter d’en découvrir les secrets. Elle agit sur elle comme pour la « nettoyer », lui retirer toute superficialité et en saisir l’essence – le sens.
En fait, Aude Herlédan s’y recherche. Derrière ces larges aplats de blanc, ces hiéroglyphes couleur d’or, ces empreintes de bleu profond ou ces formes sculptées qui s’enroulent dans l’espace, ce sont autant de traces d’elle-même qu’elle tente de faire apparaître, de nous faire découvrir. 
Son art est exigeant : il demande à celui qui le regarde de prendre le temps, de s’y immerger en douceur, pour que de cette matière transformée lui parviennent peu à peu les échos d’un ailleurs. 
Aude Herlédan a voyagé. Elle s’est nourrie d’autres mondes, de leurs vibrations et de leurs beautés, de leurs humeurs et de leurs excès. Leur souffle anime ses œuvres. Son geste s’en saisit, avec humilité et détermination, avec force et sérénité, mêlant les paradoxes – à l’image des complexités de ces univers.   

Edouard Dor - Juin 2020

Journaliste, essayiste et éditeur

Il est l’auteur de plusieurs essais sur l’art, dont : Sur les barques de Braque - 2013; Rembrandt et la jeune fille de Varsovie - 2014; Rothko pour s’y perdre - 2015; Picasso, l’énigme de ‘La Vie’ - 2018; Nicolas de Staël, l’impossible ‘Concert’ - 2019 ; Francis Bacon, en morceaux choisis - 2019...

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A Land that Resembles You
The Paintings of Aude Herlédan

An artist intuitively seeks out places with which her soul identifies. Aude Herlédan has made mapping that pilgrimage a lifelong practice. The energetic swoops and bowls of her paintings are topographies of her spiritual journey, mirroring the lifts and falls of a soul’s path: white cumuli mark elevations of consciousness in Floating (2019) and Equanimité (2015); black strokes locate the ley lines of a disquieted mind in Désordre (2017) and Contradiction (2017). Her canvases are records of physical continents and states of being—terrestrial and celestial territories through which she has traveled to create her body of work. 

As spiritual beings transcend borders, Aude moves fluidly among mediums. Her ink studies transmute into bronzes. In her paintings, strokes amass in waves, becoming sculptural. In the cover detail of Everywhere, we see the latter process magnified: depths of white material rise into three-dimensional surfaces. Her mixed-media work encapsulates the breadth of her mastery: Beginning with a panel of canvas or wood, she brushes oils and inks, dusts marble powder, and limns copper or gold leaf, layering method and material into radiant strata.

The palimpsest is a natural form for an artist deeply engaged with the textual. When I first met Aude, she was collaborating on an artist’s book with French poet Edouard Dor. Each week, she received from him a new poem, and retreated to her studio in Sologne to conjure a painting in response. Now, in her own book, she is in dialogue with Baudelaire, Wilde, and her father, TK, himself a poet. She refers to her incandescent series Blue Is the Color of My True Love as an “invitation to the voyage,” invoking Baudelaire: 

Child, Sister, think how sweet to go out there and live together! 
To love at leisure, love and die in that land that resembles you!
….There, there’s only order, beauty: abundant, calm, voluptuous.

Always traveling, always seeking, Aude’s choice for the epigraph of this book is a passage from Caspar David Friedrich, that 19th-century master of the interior landscape: “The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees within himself.” In Aude’s monograph, we have an atlas of those terrains. White Landscapes, Precious Land, Near & Far: In viewing these bodies of work, we simultaneously travel inward and outward—and discover that rather than at endpoints, it is on these voyages that we locate ourselves.  

Alisa Carroll - May 2020

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Based in Paris and San Francisco, Alisa Carroll writes about art and culture. She is editor in chief of, and a contributor to, In the Making (Fall 2019). Alisa is also a contributor to Cultured, covering artists and exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.  Alisa programs and moderates talks internationally on collecting, curating, design, and art practice.

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