Since the beginning, my concern, as much pictoral as sculptural, has been not going outside the limits of the frame but also not locking myself into them.
My intention, following Maître Hokusai, has been "to trace a line to signify life" and so also death and the eternal rebeginning of the questioning place between the two that is where we are. The book is beyond this idea and the plastic working-out of this intention; the book is the witness of the thought and the memory of the world; the book is at the origin of my work.

From primeval composition of the book I came to consider my painted canvasses mounted with paper and my work on paper as pages of a biography that I should have begun writing with a brush and which continued, giving them a freedom that a chassis or a frame cannot come to destroy. My paintings become in this way… finally free… limitless, akin to the pages of a book.

In addition to paper as technique inherent in my painted and sculpted work, other constants also arise from the theme of the book: the graphic scriptural elements, the tetragrammatic symbol that I repeat infinitely, and the tetragrammatic grid of squares that structure the painted canvasses and the wall sculptures, marked with scriptural motifs that also arise from the logogram or the tetragram. These grids, because they are not limited by the vertical, invite us to think that they continue on to infinity. This "structure of endless mirrors" make us think also of the multiplicity of lines of writing and of books, which we find in my book-objects, unique objects, that are mostly spherical, allowing the "book" to be embraced in the infinite and the circular line of the letter.

Sylvia Elharar-Lemberg
July 1994



Continuing and following up on this work, where the "Name" had to be written in the interrogative and the spiritual, the passing of time has made room for a look onto the space surrounding my workplace and the hubbub of the railroad around my studio: archetypal place of inscription, where the traces of the trains that pass and in passing mark the tracks and traces of that passing are inscribed in a proces like that of the work that make my artwork.

First I "inspected" ans "inhaled" theses places searching for a history common to the places and the works, made up if need be. With no alternative but to get to know these places so impressive and fascinating, I undertook along the railroad track the "gleaning" of the objects most significant to me and I waited for them to "recognize" me. They have slowly taken their place in the sculptures, the assemblages, the collages, etc.

After the "Name", the "Place" seems to be the next step: my canvasses in little squares of letters point to the tubes and the railway lines in order to cross over them by a new writing into a labor that came before the station of Noisy le Sec

Sylvia Elharar-Lemberg
March 1996