In 2021, Caribaï was invited to exhibit her work in the marble and glass jewel box designed by Kenzô Tange, in among an exceptional collection of Asian art. Inspired by this setting, her original creation is based on two principles of Chinese landscape painting that are dear to her: ‘Wind-Light’ and ‘Mountain-Water’. From hangings to polyptych, she invites the visitor to follow her route through the museum, from the foot of the staircase to the first floor Buddhist rotunda, guiding him or her along what is above all an inner exploration.
Mingling continuity and rupture, this pathway has been conceived as an ascent- exploration through the museum which, combining the circle (symbol of the sky) with the square (symbol of the earth) becomes a synthesis of the world. Kenzô Tange’s desire to install his architecture on a pool of water and to integrate the external environment (thanks to extensive glass walls) as an essential element of any visit, closely matches the artist’s intention. Thanks to this mise en abîme, the exhibition and its setting share the same guiding spirit.
3
Since the idea of transition is especially significant in her artistic practice, Caribaï has conceived a collection of 24 hangings she calls Monde Flottant (Floating World). These hangings evoke Japanese noren, cloths hanging in doorways to signify the passage from one space to another while allowing air and light to pass through. Suspended at a height of five metres, they underscore the shape of the opening created by the spiral staircase in the open ceiling by the spiral staircase, and emphasize the museum’s architecture. The artist sees this as a way of inviting the visitor to arrive unburdened at the painting on display in the rotunda, freed for a moment from concerns and ready to adopt a contemplative mood.

L’empreinte du vent (The Imprint of the Wind), the largest installation created to date by Caribaï, stretches for 33 metres round the rotunda. It is made up of several Dépaysages (Dis-locations) that resonate and interact in a play of echoes and rhythms that are close to music. L’empreinte du vent was devised to complement the rotunda’s exhibition area, creating a space that would harmonize with our precious collection of antique Buddhas.

Caribaï’s monumental work is made up of 43 panels measuring 185 cm high by 72 cm wide. The panels bring together ink painting, collage, and woodcuts. Each of the forty- three surfaces reflects an essential element of the landscape, in a tight framework that renders the representation abstract. Only the entirety of the panels gives the visitor a complete reading, whilst giving him or her the sensation that it could be extended to infinity.

The style of presentation recalls the interior decoration of Japanese palaces and castles, where sliding panels (fusuma) and screens (byôbu) dis-assemble the landscape on their surfaces. The apparent simplicity and humility evoked by the artist’s Dépaysages (Dis- locations) are also reminiscent of the world of the scribes. Caribaï engages her whole body in a process of creation that is both interior and exterior, as a Chinese painter does when he mobilizes the different energies (qi) that running through his body as he creates a work. Like him, Caribaï does not paint from nature, but reconstructs natural elements or phenomena out of sensations and emotions.
However, Caribaï differs from Chinese painters who traditionally paint on a sheet of paper rolled on vertical and horizontal scrolls. Her work of assembling, juxtaposing and engraving adds a plastic dimension to her art, created by the accumulation of matter, depth, and relief.

L’empreinte du vent (The Imprint of the Wind) was made and conceived as a horizontal screen seen from right to left: the visitor enters the space at the far right of the painting and can survey the entire extent of the work. The artist however has chosen a very free kind of reading that aims to absorb the viewer in the landscape being represented. She explains that ‘the sought-after dynamic is one of reminiscence over any realistic representation, of coherence over logic, the indeterminate over the circumscribed, spiritual resonance over formal description, contemplation over observation, multiplicity over unity, of a visitor in movement over one given a fixed position in advance.’

From interior to exterior, void to plenitude, East to West, Caribaï’s work accompanies us in a constant movement between extremes. The artist has adopted codes and concepts from Far-Eastern painting, enriched by her own journey and sensibility, to establish a visual vocabulary entirely her own. The exhibition ‘In a Floating World’ offers the opportunity to extract and display a fragment of the remarkable landscape of her imaginary.

In a Floating World

Take 3D Tour