Galerie Catherine Putman has pleasure in holding a new exhibition of works by Eloïse Van der Heyden  '… cause you’re playing with fire '. Always ready to grasp the print of the world, the interpenetration of humans and their environment, Eloïse Van der Heyden explores matter to reveal parallels between the elements.

            A fire burned part of the trees in a forest. Eloïse Van der Heyden made prints of bark and trunks—fascinated by the burned matter and using paper to absorb the pigments of blackness and destruction.

            The smoke from the disappearance of this terrestrial plant matter rises into the sky. She then became captivated by this untouchable matter that led her to research and experiments. She dug a kiln in the earth and smoked her ceramics, imprinting earthenware sculptures with infinite shades of the blackness of smoke. This brought out a set of spherical or incurved celestial bodies.

            Then, in a kind of circular movement, Eloïse Van der Heyden returned to paper and, 'playing with fire' as in the Rolling Stones song, wanted to subject it to smoke. Taking up the subject of the dress, a symbolic and significant garment, she addressed it using sculpture, as she experimented in the series Waste of paper (2019).  The switch to three dimensions gives the dress a mysterious appearance, a suggested fragility that is only apparent. The paper sculpture resists flame and is transformed and magnified—driven by the symbolic force of fire.

            The smoke escaped and reached the sky that Eloïse Van der Heyden captures and reveals by indigo dye. This traditional technique forms a link to the plant world—at the heart of her explorations for several years now. With her hands in this living material, using a very earthbound, tangible gesture, she seeks to render the ethereal and reveal it on paper.
            From forest to cave and from branches to the sky, Eloïse Van der Heyden's exhibition grasps the world in the same way that she grasps art and life, an indissociable entity, the continuous circulation of elements, formed by what is the deepest in each and all of us.