The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesque

A digital exhibit and collaboration between artist Claire Le Pape and The Jugaad Project. This curatorial essay is part of our Winter 2020 Issue on Color and is accompanied by a series of videos posted here and on our Instagram.

Citation of essay: Hughes, Jessica and Urmila Mohan.  “The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesques.” The Jugaad Project, 15 Dec. 2020, thejugaadproject.pub/the-color-of-memory [date of access]

Citation of Instagram exhibit: JugaadProject. “The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesques.” Instagram, Jessica Hughes and Urmila Mohan, 16 December 2020, www.instagram.com/p/CI142gmhM4A/

Some colors are so strongly rooted in a particular historical moment that they can transport us back there, or at least bring something of that time forward into the present. For Bordeaux-based artist Claire Le Pape color connects her imaginatively with other periods and places. Tender, fragile pinks transport her to the Roman Catholic basilica of Assisi, and the fourteenth-century fresco cycle depicting the life of St Francis, commonly attributed to the Italian painter Giotto di Bondone.

‘Giottoesques’ series of weavings and paintings by Claire Le Pape. Image courtesy of the artist.

Le Pape’s series of Giottoesques (featured above) was the starting point for a conversation that we recorded this summer. Our discussion formed the basis of an Instagram exhibition on artistic process, inspiration and innovation titled The Color of Memory, produced to coincide with our Fall issue on Color. Despite the restrictions of Covid-19, Le Pape was continuing work in her studio, weaving new pieces from bright nylon threads, creating collages from bits of gold foil and other found materials, and painting gouaches on cardboard superimposed with crisp circles of color.

Claire Le Pape’s studio. Works which ‘decompose’ colors into gradient patterns are displayed in the background, behind the artist’s loom. Photo by artist.

The Giottoesque series has long roots, reaching back to a visit she made to Assisi at the age of eighteen.

It was my first trip to Italy, it was July 1997, I was eighteen and had travelled to Umbria for a youth international summer work camp organized by a nonprofit for ecology. That September, I would join a famous Parisian art school, to study fashion design. One of the camp leaders decided we would work in the morning, and in the afternoon we would discover the region he was very proud of, so he organized a few fieldtrips. One of them was to Assisi. The surprise came from the context – this place was unexpected, for the camp’s aim was to spend two weeks cutting grass on historical local paths in the middle of nowhere...

What struck me was also the difference from what I used to see in Spain, where I frequently visited churches when traveling with my parents. As a kid they seemed to me all the same, dark, stark, and boring! Here, the stone were bright, even pink; and it was painted everywhere, colored. It seemed lively.

With my friends I had planned to go to Florence and Rome after the camp; we discovered so many monuments and museums... but the number of tourists, and the weight of history made thing more tedious, whereas in Assisi it was fresh and unexpected. However, I kept very few memories from the first visit in Assisi, except a kind of atmosphere. It was also a pre-digital time when you could not take as many pictures as now!

From the artist’s Instagram post. @clairelepapeplasticienne Image courtesy of artist.

Le Pape’s interactions with the work of Giotto, stretching by now over several years, brings the role of memory to the forefront.

Then there was this terrible earthquake in September which destroyed the main church, and the frescoes.

I went back to Italy almost every two years since, but to other places.
I came back to Assisi in 2013; everything had changed after the re-building of the city. I didn’t recognize much, except the Santa Clara church, and the lower church in the Basilica. The frescoes in the upper church had probably been restored, and they were brighter than before, so I noticed them more accurately. I was also older, with a far wider art culture, so I could enjoy and appreciate everything more.

My most recent visit was in 2018. This time I recognized everything, and was able to spend a long time in both churches, and we could walk to the San Damiano convent. The image I had in mind was not there anymore; I remembered a tiny, cute, rural place, but everything was very neat and clear, with a new path and pavement. But it was quiet and there was something peaceful and inhabited in the air.

‘The Renunciation of Wordly Goods’ by St Francis. Image Source.

Aspects of the St Francis fresco cycle would remain fixed in the artist’s memory, filtering through into her own work in later years. Even though she was working with very different materials (like nylon fishing wire, paper, foil, chalk) and using different techniques (loom weaving, embroidery and watercolor, amongst others), she often found herself being drawn to the same soft pinks, the ochre and sienna yellow, and the reddish-brown umber tones that she had seen in Assisi.

Intriguingly, though, Le Pape only became aware of these links between her work and that of Giotto much later, after the works had been completed. Looking at her photographs of Assisi and books about St Francis, she suddenly noticed that many of her works found exact parallels in works by Giotto – not in terms of form or subject matter, but rather in the way that they juxtaposed particular colors, and played with ideas of fading, and of gradient, as well as the notion of ‘trapping’ one color or material inside another. This sparked the process of more conscious retrospection and experimentation which led to the Giottoesque series of 2014.

A study of color interaction by the artist. Photo courtesy of Claire Le Pape.

Le Pape’s interactions with the work of Giotto, stretching by now over several years, brings the role of memory to the forefront.

I read a lot, and I have a very good memory. But when looking for documentation I often forget the sources! I was not trained as a scholar so I never learned how to classify and it bores me... I sometimes regret it because I lose track of interesting information. So in my mind there is a kind of "mixture" of things I saw for real, but also images from books (for example the frescoes in the Scrovegni chapel in Padova, Giotto's other masterpiece), things I heard or read, etc.

In the end, my work is an interpretation of this mix; into one single piece there will be various influences, that I do not anticipate; and when I see the piece, I think "oh, incredible, this looks like XXX and YYY"!!!

Before starting something, I often have a flash, a vision, and the long process of making (in tapestry especially) ‘un-builds’ how this final vision came.

And in some ways, human memory is like the frescoes – full of gaps and fadings, and fragile by virtue of their attachment to a larger, ultimately decaying structure (whether a stone wall, or human brain). As Claire Le Pape explained to us, the fragility of the frescoes arises from their direct application onto (or even ‘into’) the plastered stone – a process which bonds them to a specific spot, making them simultaneously more vulnerable and more magical.

The fragile aspect of this painting, directly on the wall, with some accidents, some missing parts... it is like a skin on the bone of stone; supporting the aging of the building with courage.

It isn’t like a painting in a museum, an oil or tempera on wood or canvas – there’s no shiny varnish, no frame...no distance between your body and the painting. And so, it looks more human, less impressive than a painting, though it has been painted seven hundred years ago.

This idea makes me so emotional: we, humans of the twenty-first century, living in a totally different world, still feel the hand of the painter – the permanence of a real human who lived, loved, and worked seven hundred years ago. The beauty comes less from the content of the work than from the…transcendence of art.

The video exhibits on this page present some aspects of Claire Le Pape’s work and its relationship with Giotto and Assisi, and reflects some aspects of our summer conversation, which ranged over topics from the relationship between color and intimacy, to the materiality and sculptural qualities of color, and the capacity of different technologies – from frescoes to Zoom – to create links and inspire artistic innovation. To find out more about Claire’s work, you can visit her website, and follow her on Instagram at @clairelepapeplasticienne

Assisi is an initiatic trip… it’s a synergy of different elements. It’s art, it’s history, it’s culture, it’s religion, it’s landscape. And I discovered all of this in one single place.

When I think about Assisi, it’s the pink color that strikes me. The stone is mostly pink, and in the frescoes you find that pink color also…. Pink has a lot of connotations, but I found it a very tender color, very soft and sweet… It’s like a symbol of flesh, and already the human condition and our fragility.

[San Francesco’s] father sells fabric and clothes. And I come from the field of textiles and fashion design. So I like this link between the story of San Francesco and my own background.

The wing for me is everything…. so detailed, compared to the rest of the characters, whose colors have faded. What I like is the contrast between that very detailed part and the fading around, and also the subjective fading for myself on the part of the image I’m not interested in.

I didn’t make any calculation of the use of color – only the pleasure to put two colors in relation. And then I could find, in Giotto’s paintings, correspondences to those color arrangements…. It’s more a color matter than a matter of shape, or composition. Sometimes both work but it’s more a ‘color work’.

The color is used in gradient, so you have the dark pink, then a little lighter…. It’s something I always liked – the gradient. It’s also something very intimate. I don’t know if there’s a healing effect [but] when I see that kind of work, I feel good.

I use weaving mostly, because I love what the gesture produces. It’s repetitive – your thoughts can just fly away. I wonder if the painters had the same effect when painting very meticulously?

I work with fishing line. Fish are supposed to see a narrower range of colors than humans. For example, you have a very neon red, and it’s supposed not to be seen in the water. So the fish does not see the line, but the fisherman does.

The challenge here was to reproduce this superposition of papers and of colors, but in a single piece, so without weaving one triangle, and then one square, and then assembling them by sewing…. Everything is intricated in the same warp.

In the weaving technique, I try to separate the warp in two parts, so I create a volume effect, like the page of a book, which you can turn… Tapestry is supposed to be very static, very bi-dimensional.  I like to introduce that three-dimensional aspect, so it turns more like a sculpture.

I also love gold foil – in fact, I work with gold chocolate paper, because it’s cheaper. I collect all the paper that covers the chocolate. And afterwards…I could find a parallel between my collages, and some pictures from Giotto’s works.

With thanks to Claire Le Pape for collaborating with us on this digital exhibition.