Portrait en Rouje: Martinet & Texereau
Martinet & Texereau is a collaborative project between two artists based in Paris, France. Using drawing as their primary medium, they create all kinds of landscape studies, hiding themselves behind a single identity.
In the era of covid-19, distance communication took over all aspects of life. I met Martinet & Texereau via Zoom, on a Friday morning for me in New York and a late afternoon for them in Paris. I could see the light from their studio hitting the wall behind them and a few rolled up drawings meticulously stored next to the desktop computer by their sides. I had not been in conversation with a duo in a while, and rediscovered the beauty of collaborative dialogue. They bounced off each other’s sentences like dancers do with their bodies. Our conversation is rooted on the basic technical pillars that define Martinet & Texereau, with a minor exploration of the changes to surrender in the covid-19 pandemic.
Photography by Louise Le Meur for Speciwomen
Philo Cohen for Speciwomen: What is the origin of the entity Martinet & Texereau?
Martinet & Texereau: We were in school together. In the very academic environment of art school, we used to collaborate on projects. One day, we decided to fully disappear behind a single scripture identity, a single style. Our goal was for no one to suspect two people were at the origin of our work. The fact that professors would not be able to give us different grades, that it was going to be our work rather than our respective works that was going to be surveyed, was interesting to us. At first, we used to fill grey zones meticulously copying the style of the other. At that time, copying and plagiarism were really frowned upon in art school.
PC: How did this new proposition survive throughout your five years at ENSAD?
MT: We handed in our series of drawings and the professors instantly asked who had done what on each drawing. We claimed we didn’t care nor would tell who had done which part. It drove them crazy. They always tried to guess, and always guessed wrongly. That was our fourth year. The final year is the year of the diploma. It is supposed to be a year spent working on a personal project, reflecting the five years spent crafting one’s artistic self at the school. It is a sort of ID for one’s future. We tried to work on respective projects but obviously… (laughs) So we worked together on a common project and passed the final exams as one.
PC: It is fascinating to think about the drawings you produce as born from two different pairs of hands. They are so meticulous and the aesthetics of each work is incredibly consistent. Can you speak a bit on your overall creative process?
MT: It starts with line drawing. Then we will pass the drawing back and forth to one another. We leave parts of the drawing unfinished for the other to complete. Nothing is planned. Our process is rooted in our combined instincts. Sometimes we will do only a couple back and forth, and sometimes ten if we are struggling. Everything is defined by both of our textural gestures, which give birth to a new texture in and of itself. Collab happens almost beyond our individual selves. In moments where we think nothing is happening, ideas freely float throughout the thread of dialogues we have and we end up building a new project we had not planned upon. It is a true pleasure for us, in our workshop, to let new dialogues emerge from the specificity of our theoretical minds.
PC: There is such an interesting contrast between the precision of the work and the chance process that is quite poetic.
MT: Both precision and chance live throughout our work. Happy chances when we cross paths with something we like and capture it, but also meticulous research. For example, when we were working on building halls, we captured a lot of them before editing our selection down to five or six final photographs to draw from. We curate the moment at which our photographs are taken with care. Waiting for rush hour to be over, for a seducing light to take over. There is true poetry that we could attempt to gain more control over, from scratch, but we are not interested in that idea as much.
PC: Can you speak a bit about the process of translating the color of the spaces you photograph to the black and white drawing?
MT: Some photographs look very interesting in color and as soon as we edit them to black and white, they lose all their charm. That happened to us a lot when we were in San Francisco during our last residency. We were on a boat in Sausalito, CA and as we always do when leaving for residencies, we had planned on starting a completely new body of work. We usually bring two or three works in progress with us, in order to still have something to work on at first but as soon as we start feeling comfortable enough in the space, we start a new project, specific to the place we are in. So we found ourselves walking through the colored streets of San Francisco. One of the artists in the residency was working on a fabric patchwork with a lot of different small fabric scraps. As we found ourselves frustrated with our usual process of photographing facades and passing them in black and whtie, we went to the store she recommended and got a ton of fabric. We decided to work with the fabric rather than our usual pencil and paper. Residencies are such a great space for experiment and research in this way.
PC: Was it the first time you worked with color from start to finish?
MT: We had previously tried color pencil but it does not work. Same with paint. Neither do pens, it is impossible to go over them which is the whole point of our practice. We tried oil painting in 2017 during a residency which we liked quite a lot. But we were to attached to the pencil/eraser dialogue to give it up for good. We were truly surprised by the array of textural nuances that mechanical pencils bring which we found again, in a completely new way with fabric. We used fabric again for a commissioned project of storefronts in Switzerland. We had carte blanche and decided to work on the coalition between image and texture. We built curtains, focusing on fabric’s capacity to translate movement. It opened up a sea of possibilities that the less flexible frame of drawing on paper did not allow us to explore before. This frightening rigidity that is pencil on paper suits us well, yet fabric allows us to move more freely, beyond our comfort zone.
PC: Speaking of comfort zones, I wonder if you could speak a little about how the two and a half months of quarantine affected your dynamic?
MT : We were lucky. Quarantine fell at quite a beneficial time for us. We had just come back from residency, spending a month in Paris to get our next show together. We had not drawn new works in a while. New desires for new drawings were sleeping inside us but we did not have the actual time to let them be. So we did not really experience that creative void a lot of people talked about. We knew what we wanted to do. We split our pencils and paper and got to work respectively. It still felt very strange. We had rarely been apart to work. The only time we spend apart is during holidays but that is planned ahead, and we don’t have to work while there. It was very new for us to be apart for an indefinite amount of time, working without one another.
PC: How does the space you work in shaping your ethics?
MT: When we graduated from ENSAD in 2010, we immediately rented a studio space. We barely worked from home. It is a luxury, we appreciate the fact that we are able to physically go to work everyday. We always noticed that outside of the work we make in the studio, we don’t draw. During holidays, we don’t have a sketchbook we keep or anything like that. We truly connected drawing directly with work. We hoped to recreate a Monday to Friday 9-5 atmosphere. There are weeks during which we spend eight hours a day drawing, so when we get out of there, we want to do other stuff.
PC: Through this photographic step, your approaches vary. In the series Fiction, there is more distance and freedom taken from the photograph than in older series such as Lieux Communs where you seem rooted in documentation.
MT: Fiction is different because it is the first time that we explore work with a diptych perspective in our work. The two images being paired together leaves more room for narrative threads to emerge. In the images curation process for this series, we chose to classify each photograph by year or object. We hoped to explore materials we had yet to incorporate in our work from the past ten years. There is more freedom in the series, more play. In the previous series, we assembled all the images on a wall. They all explored the same theme. They analyzed one specific subject from a wide range of point of views, like in the series Paresse for example. In Fiction, we tried to juxtapose images that did not explore the same theme or did not necessarily have anything in common.
PC: Will Fiction be exhibited in a different way from your previous series?
MT: Virginie Huet, an author and art critic, wrote some short stories departing from the different compositions. Her narratives are quite cinematic. We will put those online alongside the works. We also have a show at the Villa Rose in Paris until July 31st that regroups both drawings and stories.
PC: Your name is not gendered. It could be a single person, like a created character, away from societal labels regarding names. Can you speak on the process of choosing a name for the duo?
MT: We wanted something simple. We liked the fact that people would not know whether we were men or women. Moreover, it is like a brand name, we liked the idea of hiding behind something that seemed to be a bigger structure. We thought about first names, but it was immediately taking on feminine connotations that burdened us. With last names, we created more distance.
Information for Martinet & Texereau’s exhibition at the Villa Rose in Paris:
Exposition Fugue
On view until July 31st 2020
84 rue d'Amsterdam, 75009 Paris.
M-F / 11am-6pm / Or by appointment only
This interview was conducted as part of Speciwomen’s partnership with Rouje.