Salon Sonia

"Salon Sonia" at Galerie Zlotowski features Audrey Guttman in dialogue with Sonia Delaunay and five contemporary artists. Following Delaunay's artistic legacy of unexpected media, playful approaches, and color-centric compositions, Guttman explores the interplay of light, color and memory as a living, never-finished material. Working across alternative photography practices, and the formal and conceptual constraints of found Tramp Art frames, her work finds a natural home in this salon setting, where painting, textile, and object designs sit side by side without hierarchy. Guttman shows works from her Tramp Squared series: semi-autobiographical cyanotypes on fabric, paper and collage, set into Tramp Art frames carved from cigar boxes by anonymous makers at the turn of the twentieth century. At the centre of the series is Prussian blue, the blue of modernity, discovered by accident by a chemist in search of red. Where Delaunay's simultaneous blues were constructed and calculated, Guttman's are born of sun and chance: light is not represented here but left to act from within, a co-author rather than a subject. Against the brown of old wood, the results vibrate in a kind of involuntary simultanisme. Delaunay marked her textile designs "tout tissu, toute matière et toute couleur", a single composition printed on silk or cotton as conditions allowed. Guttman's cyanotypes work the same way, printed by the sun on paper or cloth from hand-cut compositions, each exposure slightly different from the one before. Neither artist accepts a single medium: this series is not quite photography and not quite drawing, suspended between the accident of the find and the deliberate placement of the image, between precise construction and the imperfection of the hand.