REVIEWS

Temin-Vergez’s work implies doubling, or twinned forms, where the surface operates as both an articulated field which mirrors itself in various form of symmetries, and a place where individual refined traceries can be both lost and unravelled in the process of looking. Vergez develops forms that traverse identifications: from sexual connotation, through Baroque ornament, to formations of nature. Both the surface and image are, in this sense, metamorphic in their nature with forms constructed from a linearity that traces a force across the canvases. Influenced by Islamic design, art nouveau, and late modernist abstraction, Claude Temin Vergez’ drawings, paintings, and installations develop on the traditions of ornamentation and its relations to mysticism, taboo, and the sublime. Vergez’ works from various sources, found images and from nature, which she intuitively deconstructs and embellishes to create motifs which are simultaneously mesmerizingly complex and classically graceful.
Executed with a certain clinical austerity – self-consciously stark surfaces, artificial colour palettes, and attenuated brushwork —her canvases evolve as exquisite luculent mandalas that suggest futuristic microcosms, equally biological and technological, beautiful ‘specimens’ of compelling presence.
The current body of work explore the relationship between the complexity of her imagery and the subjects they first originated from. The result is of constant shifting images at once intuitive and highly construstructed.

Patricia Ellis, Artist, Writer 2015

La Peinture est Presque Abstraite

Doubling, or twinned forms, is implied […] in Claude Temin-Vergez’s work, where the surface operates as both an articulated field which mirrors itself in various form of symmetries, and a place where individual refined traceries can be both lost and unraveled in the process of looking. Temin-Vergez develops forms that traverse identifications: from sexual connotation, through Baroque ornament, to formations of nature. Both the surface and image are, in this sense, metamorphic in their nature with forms constructed from a linearity that traces a force across the canvases. The work […] explores this relationship between this linear movement and accumulation of a symmetrical static web of intertwined lines, which, in its mirroring or twinning, becomes a form – perhaps a vessel-like shape or a body of sorts.

David Ryan, Artist & Critic 2010

From the book ‘La peinture est Presque Abstraite 2010

New Paintings by Claude Temin-Vergez

There are painters who need to dig in to their chosen territory; others, perhaps less numerous, prefer to keep moving on. Both approaches are valid, and occasionally artists suddenly convert from one sort to the other. For now, at least, Claude Temin-Vergez seems to belong to the second group. The first works of hers I saw, back in 2002, were all-over abstractions with clear reference to Jackson Pollock on the one hand and ‘70s pattern painting on the other, in which arabesque skeins of purely linear patterning cavorted atop monochromatic grounds. Within a couple of years, though, this allover linear web had been transmuted from the direct path of color itself to, in a way, something much more classical, an underlying drawing, with the painted surface itself having become a pulsating patchwork of intricately interlocking colored shapes?units of sheer sensory impulse whose value demanded to be experienced haptically as much as optically. Ornate, flamboyantly twisting and swelling forms derived both from the observation of biological forms and nature and from studies of the way such forms have historically been translated into decorative schemata, for example in art nouveau, counterpointed determinedly flat color. With no point of rest for the eye or mind, the rococo excess of these works could be exhausting.
Clearly realizing that with all these “contraction/dilatations, recto/verso, multiple/twisting, turning, invagination, and a multiplication of oppositions that give birth to multiplicities,” as the artist herself once put it, there might be little scope for pushing much further in this direction, Temin-Vergez has now wisely opted to prune back all that lavish sensory abundance. Now, protuberant tendrils of color, twining biomorphic strands, stand out against a return of the monochrome ground, and in some cases these patches of color have given way to simple colored outlines. In essence, Temin-Vergez has come to the realization that there is greater pictorial power to be derived from working neither with a classic figure/ground dichotomy in which self-contained shapes can be more or less clearly distinguished nor with the allover, in which this dichotomy is done away with, but rather with this more ambiguous situation in which a profusion of small-scale elements, somewhat elongated so that they seem at a halfway point between being shapes and lines, agglutinate into these diffuse yet not allover configurations that are, as the artist herself puts it, “forms without form, shapes without shape.” There is undoubtedly something seductive about these formless forms that remind us so strongly of things that we find decorative and beautiful but they harbor a subliminal sense of threat as well, because there is something inherently unnatural underlying their hallucination of naturalness. You want to keep your eye on them, at once for delight and from mistrust, until you finally can’t tell the two feelings apart.

Barry Schwabsky 2006

Ebb & Flow, Raid Projects, Los Angeles, 2-30 December 2006 By Janet Owen Driggs

Curated by three UK-based artists who are simultaneously rooted in the traditions of painting and immersed in tradition-challenging criticality, Ebb & Flow is a thoughtful interrogation of what it might mean to be ‘painterly’ now. In particular, having embraced Deleuze’ rhizomic model of dynamic multiplicity, curators Jimmy Conway-Dyer, Alistair Payne, and Claude Temin-Vergez have identified artists who take painterly sensibilities on an exploration of Deleuzian fluidity.
Traveling to Raid Projects from London’s Three Colts Gallery, Ebb & Flow presents paintings, sculpture, and video works alongside hybrid projects, including an erudite text by David Ryan. The hinge is Diana Cooper’s Close To It (2004), part relief, part cutout, in which explosive Missoni-like patterns encounter a grid. Layered physically and graphically, Close To It pivots between those exhibited works that operate inside the frame, those that come off the wall, and those that, by engaging screen-based technologies, introduce explicit movement into the equation.
In the former group, Michael Stubbs’ Ef Vanitas #2 (2006) features viscous layers that are poured, brushed, and stenciled onto a mirrored aluminum ground, creating a spatial multiplex that appears to pulse between surface and depth. Taking a different route to visual dynamism, Temin-Vergez’ almost atonal acrylic paintings ‘Paradisios#3’ blossom with intricate patterns that are designed to stimulate a kind of restless looking that the artist describes as “flow of vision”.
Denying the wall entirely, Phyllida Barlow’s Untitled (2006) is wood, tape, and cardboard structure reminiscent of an elongated hobbyhorse, which stretches from ceiling to floor, creating a powerful diagonal mark in space. Similarly freestanding, but more a consideration of pictorialism and gesture than of mark-making, Conway-Dyer’s 21st Century Green Man (2006) is two-sided metal frame from which pastel-colored plastic circles hang to ‘draw’ a face. In contrast Fransje Killaars’ bed-like installations confound a frontal view to operate as colorful mediations between floor and wall that, because they are represented in this iteration of the exhibition by a poster, also mediate here between actual and depicted space.
Completing the trio of strategies, Edgar Schmitz-Evans’ Doooon (2005) utilizes the constant motion possibilities of an animation loop, to depict the repeated collapse of a pink building (the Monkey Palace from Jungle Book). While Alistair Payne’s Untitled (2006) ? a looped and projected close-up of oil meeting water ? continually fills its screen/wall with raspberry-tinted bubbles that roil in a glass tank, build to an orgiastic climax, and then subside before bubbling up again.
Individually informed by the concept and the actuality of a ground ? the static surface upon which paint ebbs, flows, and dries ? and by the constellation of ideas that position constant ‘becoming’ against the static state of ‘being’, the works selected for Ebb & Flow take a fittingly heterogeneous approach to exploring the relationship between motion, immobility, and immobilization. At the same time, the multiplicity that is held inside the exhibition’s conceptual frame speaks to the ‘stuff’ of paint: a viscous entity that both flows and resists flow. With an ambition that is (almost breathtakingly) reminiscent of the approach to sculpture taken by the UCLA Hammer Museum’s (infinitely better funded and incomparably larger) Thing exhibition, it is a vivid and multi-vocal advocacy for the contemporary significance of paint and painting that Ebb & Flow achieves.

Playing with perfection

In Claude Vergez’ post-ornamental paintings, entanglement is there as motive of the lines and shapes, blobs and patterns that make up her vinyl or painted applications, on walls or paper or canvas). They seem to spread outward, grow like minerals do, and like these with an infectious charge. Entanglement then is also underlying condition of their being (on the wall, in space, on the canvas) Reminiscent of organic as such as mineral patterns of proliferation, explicitly synthetic in their visual saturation, vaguely domestic in hue and yet sinister in virulent potential, these form-masses are hybrid not only in the ambiguity of their provenance, but also by defying expectations as to what to do with them. Not knowing how to look at them only doubles the confusion of not knowing what they are (high and low play into this, too, as do decoration and abstraction) in their carefully calibrated mode of being (paintings).
All this is brought forward with a feigned nonchalance that insists on their being all these things. No matter how much the patterns and paintings are sited, they are there to be looked at, the contained sprawl of the wall drawing as much as the ‘blobs’ inside the circular perfection of a shaped canvas. There is a dynamic to them that plays with growth and acceleration, and there is tension/ confusion in how this dynamic is then contained within the square (!) of ‘blob-field 2’. There is a similar one in the way in which the chaotic pattern of ‘tondo#1’ miss-matches its own circular shaped canvas.
Not a sprawl contained on the wall or in the time of the painting. Playing around the perfect pattern, sprawls as union etc and the circle as the ultimate form of perfection. But then nothing answers that. Instead the works solicit perfection (and design and decoration and abstraction) only to turn and twist them unstable through the flux of allusions to each other. Beyond all their beauty and genuine appeal, they make a claim exactly by refusing to belong to any one place. The challenge is, knowing how to look at them in all these different ways at once.
--Edgar Schmitz-Evans, Artist & critic, 2005--

Between Eyes and finger tips, 2006, Teresita Dennis, Mindy Lee and Claude Temin-Vergez

The circle of life: an Elton John song from The Lion King, a Disney film, a philosophy, a subplot to an art exhibition. As one life fades another one brightens, fuelled by the life that preceded it.
It may just be that this reporter is coming to the end of his degree but he was struck by a profound sense of the circular nature of life circumnavigating this exhibition.
Between eyes and fingertips is an exhibition exploring paintings produced as an expression. Through one entry point we are ‘Sailing away’ with a painting that could naively be thought of as a design point. This exhibition and Claude Temin-Vergez’s work is certainly not that frivolous.
Temin-Vergez’s work appears to be carefully painted. Its precision is amazing. The work is quite difficult to read as it verges on the edge between 2D and 3D. However, her suitable palette is easy to experience. To this reporter it also appears quite reticent. Conversely, this does make her work intriguing.
Imperial’s very own Mindy Lee is not just curating; we have the pleasure of her exhibiting work on this occasion. Her pieces convey universal experiences in a manner that is very individual. We experience the emotions from her work. They are not all pleasant though. The sense of revulsion is conspicuous in ‘its not fair,’ with its clever use of colour. Lee’s work is accessible to the viewer, reaching out in its complex use of acrylic that extends to and beyond the edge of the canvas.
Teresita Dennis’ work is awesome. The large canvases are proportional to the large intricate rich oil images. Her works are a manipulation of detailed patterns reminiscent of chaotic turbulent fluid flow and also have elements that compare to aboriginal art. Dennis’s, ‘The wound which opens and closes the eye,’ has some interesting red dots.
This is one exhibition that can be appreciated on two levels ? perfect for this time of year where some people have more time available than others. The exhibition is in the Blyth Gallery on the fifth floor of the Sherfield Building. The exhibition is open from Monday ? Sunday from 9am ? 10pm, until 29 May 2006. So why not take a trip ‘on the path unwinding?
--Keith Brown, 2006--

Claude Temin-Vergez - Reviews - Brief Article | ArtForum | Find Articles at BNET

HOULDSWORTH
It's surprising, when you think about it, how many women painters lately have been using Abstract Expressionism as a foil for their own work. In New York one can easily think of artists as various as Sue Williams, Suzanne McClelland, and Cecily Brown. Now, from France by way of London (where she was educated and currently works), comes Claude Temin-Vergez, who clearly has taken Jackson Pollock's poured paintings as her reference point, thereby showing a degree of nerve that's either admirable or foolish depending on your point of view. (It says a lot for both artists that whatever else one thinks of TeminVergez's paintings, they don't look dated.) Not that she emulates the reckless and expansive character of Pollock's art. Her reinterpretation is essentially formalist--focusing on the swirling, interlacing arabesques of paint in his classic poured works of 1947 and 1950 and the way those webs of color sir so determinedly atop their canvas support--but inflected, perhaps, by '70s-derived notions of pattern as a specifically feminine approach to form.
Temin-Vergez amplifies both the decorative character of the Pollockesque line and its physical palpability. Working on rigid supports (MDF or aluminum panels that have been painted a single opaque color) rather than canvas, she refuses her skeins of acrylic color any degree of absorption into the ground. Her extremely plasticky colored lines are emphatically tactile, and they intertwine, at times piling up, without ever mixing. This is made all the more obvious by the fact that Temin-Vergez works to create a suggestion of fragmentation. She never covers the near-entirety of the ground, as Pollock usually did, knitting together a relatively homogeneous surface; instead she emphasizes the dichotomy of paint and support and the distinction between one line and another by leaving much of the monochrome ground exposed. Likewise she counters Pollock's sense of the painting's internal wholeness, indicated by the way his pours are mostly contained within the limits of the canvas, by always allowing her patterns to g o off the edges of the rectangle.
Like her emphasis on materiality and decoration, Temin-Vergez's insistence on fragmentation is clearly polemical in intent--but it tends to weaken the paintings. The best canvases here are the most "allover" ones: Coulee-Creme (A pouring of cream), 2001, has a strongly centrifugal arrangement, a device that turns the monochrome ground, in this case a hot pink, into a kind of atmosphere or "space" rather than the literal surface the artist seems to want her grounds to remain, but helps create a sense of cloisonne richness that justifies the title of another of the more prepossessing paintings, Thousand Fold, 2002 (which also gives the exhibition its title). By contrast, those paintings in which the linear arabesques are confined to a single zone within the rectangle, such as Depliage Serie #1 (Unfolding series #1) and Depliage Serie #2, both 2002, are the least satisfying. Here the decorative really threatens to become a kind of trimming, a mere garnish on what has become the dominant element of the painting: a monochrome rectangle that is not, after all, so very interesting in itself.
--Barry Schwabsky, 2002--
COPYRIGHT 2002 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

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