The work of Anne Blanchet throws open doors and breaks down borders. She is inspired by minimalist and conceptual art of the 1960s, which she discovered during her stay in the United States, and shares with artists like Donald Judd (1928-1994) and Carl Andre (*1935) a reflection on space, as well as a predilection for industrial materials and for the modest intervention that is entirely devoid of the gestural. The apparent banality of her installations is an invitation to understand them beyond their materiality and consider them via the intellect. Her pieces are not a far cry from the theories about theatricality and the disappearance of the author that are inherent in the works of artists from that period, but they also stand apart for their use of cutting-edge technologies and the presence of movement.
Her first mobile work, Doors 97: Visual Music, comprises five sliding glass doors that open and close automatically, each at a different pace. The unequal passage that is created in this way suggests movements alternating between attraction and repulsion and conjures up for us multiple respirations. Both the play on the material's transparency and the allusion to the sense of hearing surface again in her Light Drawings, which are true drawings with light employing frosted Plexiglas plates that have been notched along a width of 400 microns. This surgical treatment of the material gives rise to a subtle play of shadows that spread out ahead of the surface, offering the illusion of a sculpted relief. Light is used here like an object that reveals space, as in the work of James Turrell (*1943), whom the artist readily refers to.
"When we say closing, we are also saying opening", as Blanchet pointed out in front of Light Bridge, her permanent installation at the University of Fribourg.
The eighteen red barriers mounted on high rectangular columns catch the eye of the passer-by, who perceives the monumentality of this passageway connecting the street and the university, the library, the dining hall and the meditation room. Animated by a dance of cleverly orchestrated disorder, these barriers open channels of communication and signify the obstacles that are encountered or removed in any life or any course of study. At dusk the neon tubes affixed to the lower face light up as if to underscore the great sensuality of this mental caress. The sea anemone becomes a firefly and lights our way through frontiers.
Céline Eidenbenz, in : Artistes à Genève : de 1400 à nos jours, dir. Karine Tissot, Genève, L'APAGe, Editions Notari, 2010, pp. 74-75