"The work lives from the way it is viewed. It is not limited to what it is or to the person who produced it, it is also made of the person who looks at it. My painting is a space of questioning and meditation where the meanings we lend it can be made and unmade. (Pierre Soulages)

Joëlle Cabanne is an artist and an architect. Her in-depth knowledge of several disciplines, from art history to the history of cinema, contributes to the creation of a substratum that favours the coexistence, in the field of the work, of a tangible (or visible) aesthetic research as well as its opposite, i.e. the intangible, the abstract and the spiritual immaterial. Using the concrete side of the work (support, colour, sign) and its phenomenological existence as a visual element is the starting point for the artist to enter into a dialogue that allows his audience to immerse themselves in an artistic universe that generates new forms of truth and beauty.

The non-existence of a univocal method capable of dictating the initial approach to his works seems to manifest an act of introspection. Indeed, as neuroscience shows, the human brain tends to reject immediately any abstractions that prevent it from identifying, for example on a surface, a shape that it is unable to recognise. In the case of the paintings in the InProcess series, which are made up of blue colour fields, the observer could be led to jump to conclusions by identifying the colour blue, its arrangement in the painted space and its material chromatic intensity as the subject of the work, but nothing is as difficult as apparent simplicity.

Contemplating Joëlle Cabanne's works is a complex multidimensional experience with many analogies to observing the sky. If, starting from the sensory experience of seeing the sky, we are able to go beyond the simple optical phenomenon, we will not only be able to assert that the sky is blue, but also to conceive that this colour, considered as an objective reality, is only due to the scattering of sunlight by particular atmospheric conditions. In this specific case, we must admit that opening the door of vision from a chromatic reality constitutes an experience that is both concrete and abstract. Similarly, by the act of painting on paper supports or on large canvases composed of shades of blue, the artist, through a gesture of generosity, confers an active role on his audience, who become capable of opening up to his gaze by questioning their own vision and marvelling at this sense that defines their way of relating to the outside. If Helen Frankenthaler, one of the major artists of Color Field Painting, developed the technique of stained color, through which paint is used as a dye and thus impregnates directly into the canvas, Joëlle Cabanne creates her own tools to paint with ink. She uses balsa wood sticks or soft branches gathered at the end of winter which allow her to control the liquid, while leaving room for chance. Establishing a direct relationship with the unconscious through ritual is the other specificity of the process adopted by the artist. First, she establishes a situation of absolute calm. Then, the inner listening allows her to receive communications coming from the deep forces, this creative process lasts until the moment when her hand is so tired that nothing more appears. Finally, the artist cuts her sheets into rectangular shapes to reassemble them in situ in the exhibition space. From this new point of view, one has the power to evoke the unitary value of the work, which is not constituted by multiples, but by a plurality of distinguished elements.

                                                                                                                   Eleonora Pimponi, art historian