Cécile Bart imagined a traveler who has recently arrived at the Hotel Windsor, resting as he lies on his bed. He closes his eyes, then opens them again and begins to daydream. A large screen floats above his head; he gazes at it and, in his reverie, sees colored squares come to life. They intersect, overlap, and drift from one edge of the surface to the other. Their imaginary movements retrace the artist’s own gestures as, at her worktable, she shifted small samples around and then glued them down, thereby developing the very design of this ceiling—the ceiling of “her” room at the Hotel Windsor. The blues, pinks, red, orange, yellow-green, violet, and black answer one another in a distinctly Mediterranean harmony. A little of the southern light enters the room. The arrangement of the squares owes everything to the chance operations of collage, much as travel itself encourages the chance encounters of a journey…
The color samples mounted on the ceiling were painted on Plein Jour Tergal fabric, which was wiped to open up the weave and preserve its transparency. Treated in this way, the fabric possesses a luminosity and color intensity that a simple dye could never achieve. Cécile Bart developed this process in 1987 and has used it ever since in works most often stretched on frames and installed within space.
