Pitchables

Presented together for the first time, Fabienne Lasserre’s decade-long Pitchables series blurs boundaries between painting and sculpture, body and space, color and form.

About the Exhibition

Known for her large-scale work that has filled museums, civic spaces, and galleries internationally, Fabienne Lasserre’s latest series emerged from her desire to create intimate work that can live alongside people in their everyday spaces, enabling the discovery and joy of recurrent close observation. Created over the span of more than a decade, the Pitchables series incorporates recurrent themes and investigations across Lasserre’s oeuvre.

Challenging modernist constraints of traditional two-dimensional art over her career, Lasserre has refined a distinctive vernacular she’s coined as “3D paintings” or “2D sculptures.” Crafted from scrap panels from her partner’s wood shop, wire loops, layers of dyed fabric, stretched vinyl, and paint, the humbly inviting Pitchables are born from her playful exploration of scale and materiality. Pushing against figuration towards abstraction, the work continues to mine Lasserre’s feminist exploration of the body, vision, and touch.

Deliberately wonky and subtly humorous, Lasserre’s work invites interaction. The pieces challenge viewers to move around them, discover their nuanced details, and engage with art in a physical, personal way. Appendages sprout forth with loops covered in mosaic fabric skins, while her signature vibrant colors play with texture and opacity. Lasserre wants us to sense vestiges of the hands and impressions that made them.

The series title emerged from the concept of "pitching a tent": the Pitchables are flexible, making a shelter and a place in the world for themselves regardless of their imperfections. Lasserre invites us to enjoy a feminist reimagining of how we perceive and interact with art, where bodies are a fluid means of exploration, and where abstraction becomes a language of inclusion and emotional depth.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

What is the origin of the Pitchables Series?

Fabienne Lasserre

I started this series because I wanted to make pieces that could be a little more intimate, that people could live with. No one I knew could fit my giant sculptures in their living space! When you’re used to working big, making things smaller can be challenging—you can’t rely on the same spatial breadth. I wasn't after a square flat piece on the wall. And so, they grew loops, some included vinyl, some got painted, some got layers of painted fabric. To me, the title "Pitchable" evokes—like you're pitching the tent. They’re a little wonky. There's something humorous, a little understated about them. 

Can you speak about this idea of humor?

I think humor and joy can be undervalued in the sense that they are not generally understood to carry a lot of serious and meaningful thought. I try to work against that conception. I think there's so much truth in humor and that you can choose to be joyful without that being an escapist position. I try to touch an emotional tone that has joy and humor, but is also very aware of difficulties in the world. That’s not a contradiction, you don't have to make a choice between the two.

Are there themes your work returns to over time?

The most recurring theme is the idea of the body and a feminist approach to rethinking the body and the senses. In our culture, I think we privilege vision over touch, and I try to mix touch and vision. I give a lot of importance to tactility.

How has your creative practice evolved?

My practice started out figurative and little by little it shed elements of figuration and has become totally abstract at this point. Also I have had periods where I only worked in black and white, and now there's a ton of color in my work. I've spoken about the element of figuration being connected to feminist concerns of the body. These themes stayed in the work even when it reached abstraction. But now the body is more present through a feeling of touch or the necessity to move around the pieces for the viewer. The viewer's body is part of the equation now more than a represented or a depicted body.

Can you elaborate on the idea of abstraction and shedding figuration?

My work was never realistic, but it was populated by bodies, monsters, imaginary beings—it represented recognizable creatures. Later, body parts remained in the work, but not so much as part of one coherent body. Gradually I started evoking the body through a certain quality of skin, tactility, and softness. Color and form took precedence over what was recognizable. To me, abstraction has become a very egalitarian way to communicate. It's less predetermined and a lot more inclusive.

Do you think of the Pitchables as bodies?

I think of them as creatures to some extent. And I think of them as covered in a skin-like substance. I think of the layering of fabric as a skin, but also as something that receives the pressure of my fingers. And visually—there's a remnant of that pressure still in the pieces, that fingering of the pieces, the application with a hand. It’s not the hand of the artist as a marker of authorship or romantic genius, a la Picasso, but the hand of a body of someone creating work through pressure and touch, through caress.

How do materials shape your process?

The Pitchables series generally starts with a piece of MDF or a plywood panel that sometimes I cut, but most often I find a piece of scrap wood in my partner's wood shop. Then I will drill holes and insert a heavy gauge wire to create loops. Then I either stretch vinyl on those loops, or not, and cover with fabric. Then I paint. It's a very similar process to my larger sculptures, but the Pitchables are smaller and a little more busy, a little more dense. The process is very flexible—I can paint over, I can layer more fabric, I can change the loops—and I almost always do. They often take a lot more time to make than the larger sculptures, strangely, because of the back and forth in the decision-making.

Can you speak about the physicality of your practice?

The making of the work is very physical, it's true. It's not that it's laborious or hard, but it is always through manipulating a shape through the strength of my arms or applying things with my hands. It's rare that I have a tool that mediates, although it does happen. The impressions of a body making the pieces or the traces of that body, the visual cues of it, are very important. As well as the impression that I imagine the viewer could have of walking through or peering over or contorting through a piece—it's a meeting of a body making and a body relating to the pieces. 

You’ve been working on the Pitchable series for more than a decade, how do they relate to the larger work? Do you think of them as part of one family?

I divide my pieces into series for the purpose of clarity when talking about the work. It is true that some series or pieces emerge from precise circumstances, but the work is all really a big soup. They blend together. What I said about what gets to count as painting—that is how all of my works exist together. I love the idea of a painting that you have to walk around and see two sides of it, like a sculpture. The different series have specificities, but they coexist. They're chatty together.

Can you elaborate on your process for your large-scale work? How are you thinking about form, shape, and color?

I'm looking for shapes that are both akin to the human body or to other bodies by being vulnerable, soft, gentle, but also shapes that are clear and simple and almost at the level of an idea or just a gesture. I find these shapes through sketching very simple sketches in pencil. Then I enlarge them on craft paper. I use the craft paper drawing as a guide and bend steel rods with a plumbing pipe bender, by hand. It’s a very physical process. Then I weld the pieces. I'll typically weld a whole bunch at once, like 15 pieces. That way, later in the studio, I can work on several at a time.

Typically, after I weld the armature, I stretch either transparent vinyl or canvas on the hoops, like a drum. Then I'll go in with bits of fabric that I have dyed or I’ve found already colored. I dip the fabric strips in acrylic polymer and do a paper mâché kind of technique. And then, most of the time, the last step is the paint—but that's only when things don't go astray, which they always do.

In some cases the vinyl stays transparent and other cases, it gets smeared with acrylic mediums with some kind of transparency, but messy. Other times I spray paint in a more elegant gradient. Other times I pour the paint on it. They dry flat so I can make the paint do what I want in terms of swirling around.

But at every step, I can change my mind. I can layer fabric over the paint. I can paint it over. I've developed processes that are flexible enough that I don't really hesitate to make a move because I know I can always change it. The pieces start pretty confused, and then one decision leads to the next and they become clear. The process is very similar for the Pitchables.

Can you speak about perspective and how you hope the viewer interacts with the pieces?

I want to make pieces that you have to walk around to understand. I think of how we perceive them as we move around them or through space. I think of the details we see when we’re far and the details we see when we're very close to them. In some pieces, you think you know what’s there but when you get close it’s something completely different. Or, you can't stick your hand through one piece because there is a screen of clear vinyl, but you can through another, there's a hole. Those kinds of discoveries are important to me. It’s important to me to provide an experience that involves change. I think that making pieces that imply time or movement is akin to accepting that things always change.

The Pitchables can be hung on a wall or sit on a pedestal. Your work is often presented in different ways spatially, sometimes dangling from the ceiling or protruding from the wall. Why?

There's a flexibility in some cases where the same piece can be presented in one way or another depending on the context. And there are pieces that I’ve conceived as wall pieces but that moved to the floor and stayed there, and vice versa. In conceiving of an installation of my work, I want to acknowledge, or give attention to, the structures around us that shape us but that we don't always notice. Ceilings, floor, walls—they all become important and not neutral, as opposed to just thinking of the wall as the place we look at. I'm thinking about the world around us that affects us from above, from the sides, from beyond.

For the hanging pieces, on these giant hooks, I was also interested in making visible this kind of dependence on the structure outside of themselves. When I use the ceiling or the walls or the floor, to prop, hang, or lean my pieces, the way they rely on the structures around them is visible. And this relation of dependence, I think, is important. We don't exist alone. We exist in relation and in dependence of others. That's what I'm implying by these pieces.