Katherine Tisné Katherine Bakhoum Tisné Katherine Bakhoum

All is quiet, and what is not quiet, is pastel anyway. Yet, just beyond the paper that receives these quick, covering, dashing, quivering, thickening, exciting but always tender strokes, something else is going on. Colors have been rubbed into the plaster of old walls. Their sources have been effaced, distanced, become decor, like all sources eventually. Yet they are there, we can feel them, they vibrate.

Work by Katherine Bakhoum Tisne has a tone of voice. Her paintings move with it. The figures dance, and the voice sings – or does it? Maybe it only speaks, -- making translation into painting possible – speaks of an intimate ambition, of a sweet folly, of ways out, and of ways in to what has been lost, and what will be discovered. And also just of what is.

Whispering galleries are acoustic miracles: you cannot see the other speaker. In these fabled arcades, the palace gossip steps into the light. “Psst,” he might be saying, “I saw him with her in the garden. He was giving her grapes.” Or is it something else entirely? Elsewhere, a wanderer spins across a horizon, his white robes unfurling in the murmur of a breeze which his dervish spirit generates. Viewed at the distance of several light years, the colors of a bonze’s red robe punctuate the text. Tufts of trees scan the line of a horizon that hums. We get closer. Bodies are letters. Or are the bodies, stars, forming constellations even as we look? In the spell-binding oriental portraits, the regard in the eyes of those portrayed disguises its own wishes, fulfills them behind the mask of beauty. Language and stars come from the same place. We are listening to someone else’s dreams. Circle the gallery clockwise. Now go the other way. You are remembering these paintings for the first time. What was décor at first, now comes with its own fresh feeling. Welcome to Katherine Bakhoum Tisne’s firmament. You have succumbed. Call it a little triumph. I would.

Roger Salloch, 2005