The Nomadic Eye

At the invitation of the curator Valérie Cueto, Audrey Guttman shows a Surrealist wall of recent works, hung in counterpoint to a bedroom whose centrepiece is a Max Ernst "Lit-Cage", nested among drawings by Picasso and Man Ray, sculptures by Agustín Cárdenas, and an 18th-century grisaille. The works shown belong to "Tramp Squared", a series that turns the Surrealist trouvaille on its head: the found object is not an endpoint but a beginning, generating the questions the image is then made to answer. Guttman collects the sculptural frames of Tramp Art, a folk practice born in the late nineteenth century in the hands of drifters who cut cigar boxes into geometry. The word holds two meanings at once in English: the vagrant who moves without fixed address, and the woman called loose, the one who strays and escapes control. That collision drives a body of collage and cyanotype in which the artist stays deliberately at the edge: between the fleeting image and the slow pictorial gesture, between abandon and revolt. Saving these objects from oblivion and lining them with ghostly presences, she honours their anonymous makers alongside the women who refuse to be reduced to a single image, a single story, a single role.