2018 - Exhibition - Espace 340

A certain archaeology of contact

The creative gesture both engages the body in the world and necessarily withdraws it from it in the presence-absence temporality of the gesture - of the imprint - of the trace, to gain the horizon of an immemorial time of beginning, of astonishment.
The work of artist Jocelyne Coster is entirely suspended by this inaugural bracketing of our relationship to the world, where immediate presence fades away to welcome the encounter, which is immediately buried in the limbo of absence, sheathed to the purity of the sign in the furrows and veins of questioning and in the “ascending” desire of this consciousness that has only itself - the world, in short - to exist.
From the first silkscreens and acrylics on canvas (Série Ascendance, 1988) - strata of time and space of being-in-altitude - to the impressions, gestures and fossilized movements of the body - her own, that of the Other, lurking in the embrasure of the disquieting strangeness of the near - Jocelyne Coster probes, explores, scans, measures, excavates and digs paths and galleries on and beneath the sedimented thickness of the world's skin. Searching for the uncertain future of humanity's reconciliation with itself.
From overhanging photographic captures of the earth, to digitized imprints of allegorical gestures ( Série Gestes, 2018 , previewed at 34 6 at Marie et Pierre Martens) ; from the poetic corset of arpents, empans et coudées , a mise en abyme of the body (2000) , to “Article 13 - 2006” of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which seals the prohibition of borders in the body and skin of humanity, the focal length of Jocelyne Coster's lens sharpens, until it is sucked - with all its light - into a space-time strangely resembling a black hole, “a point of infinite diversity where the curvature of space-time is also infinite” that has become the guardian of the memory of contact retained in imprint and gesture. The gesture, as if in apnea in this in-between realm, transits with a disturbing density and vibration. Encased in the mesh of the imprint, it is no longer the “likeness of contact” but contact itself, a fragment of reality and universal humanity. In a singular movement, collapse, the surface of appearances collapses, erecting a block of temporary eternity.
A lens polisher, the philosopher Spinoza slipped into the inventory of his estate “long sights, magnifying glasses, lenses cut for this purpose and various tools for cutting both grinding wheels and magnifying glasses etc.”. Feuerbach wrote of him that “Spinoza's philosophy is a telescope that brings within reach of the eye objects invisible to man because of their remoteness” (History of Modern Philosophy, 1833). As for us, let's allow ourselves to be tamed by the enigma and force of Jocelyne Coster's creation, to “bring the invisible relationships between beings within reach of the eye and the heart”.

Nadine Monteyne - Philosopher

2017 – MENA - Permanent installation - Red Cross Refugee

Permanent installation by artist Jocelyne Coster on the premises of the Uccle-Red Cross Refugee Reception Center.
“MENA” could be the name of a constellation of stars. A constellation of exiled minors, arriving alone in Europe, guided by the hope of a better life in a welcoming land where their human rights would be respected. The administrative acronym MENA literally means “unaccompanied foreign minor”... a vulnerable human being, marked by the scars of separation, doubt, fear, exile and its pitfalls. Scars that dig into the skin the furrow of memory, sketching the almost harmonious contours of a utopian landscape where borders would punctuate the score of a free, equal and fraternal world. A body palimpsest of travel, origins and the future.
Artist Jocelyne Coster engages with the world she inhabits with all her humanity, and whose strata she has always explored through her “cartography-dermography” work. She is in the world, and stands in close proximity to a dialogue between the body, her own, and the universal body of the Other. She suspends the breath of her inspiration, sometimes to the point of apnea, to the purity of bodies, their sign. All vigilance and poetry combined, her artistic approach weaves the in-between of a relationship with the Other, the body of the Other that is also her own, at once familiar in Humanity and of a “disquieting strangeness” to be tirelessly probed in an attempt to pierce its enigma.
Because the meaning of her work and her life are naturally intertwined, Jocelyne Coster became a volunteer two years ago at the Uccle reception center to help MENA teenagers achieve their integration goals through “normal” schooling.
In the summer of 2017, Jocelyne Coster received a proposal from the Centre to use the walls of the reception room to create a work in connection with the place and the history of these young teenagers.

With the agreement and trust of the management and team in charge, J.C. created a mural of anonymous thumbprints from twelve teenagers at the Center who had wished to take part in the project. The artist's own thumbprint mingles and blends in. The whole forms a landscape that is at once interior and geological, crossed by the Ariadne's thread of a dynamic, melodious, red and seismic border. The topography of interlocking, overlapping stories. A singular narrative of singular and universal stories. The prints were mounted on the walls of the teenagers' reception room. Day after day, they remind them of where they come from - with their cracks and scars - and point the way to hope in a humanity that will always reach out to them.

Nadine Monteyne - Philosopher

2016 – Exhibition – Artitude gallery

What is the boundary between our body and the world? And how do I situate myself in the universe? To answer these questions, Jocelyne Coster first poses a few others: how big is the world? And how big is the human being in this world? What scales can be calculated from these two essential poles? What do these scales of measurement tell us?
Jocelyne Coster constantly questions the relationship between the human being and the universe. That is, between her own body and the immensity of what surrounds her. This questioning is at the heart of her work. Taking her measurements, she then seeks to put them into dialogue. The infinitely small and the infinitely large respond to each other. They are close, almost similar. They have astonishing and moving bonds of brotherhood.
Thus, in photographing landscapes seen from the sky, she relates them to the imprints of a skin. The topography of a vast, wide place versus a small, enlarged piece of epidermis. In so doing, she explodes our relationship to the size of things. With these links, the artist enters into a universal dialogue that we cannot refuse. Because it's a question of our identity. Sometimes, tensions appear between these two extremes. Coster makes us see them. She takes a stand.
For her new work, she presents a language with hands. One or two hands are set in motion, expressing a concept that can be understood the world over: the hitchhiker's thumbs-up, a counting hand, an accusing finger, two hands miming the sexual act... After geographical borders, it's the borders of communication and language that the artist is trying to break down. If these gestures are universal and understandable to everyone around the globe, then something akin to appeasement is possible.
Investigating the power of words, Jocelyne Coster seizes on a couple of antonyms with which she plays unrestrainedly. On an elegant black metal pleat, abundance can be read on one side, while on the other, austerity. Further on: reality - fiction, impartial - arbitrary or cynicism - respect... It's the angle of view that defines what is to be read. This is the artist's trademark, as she strives again and again to propose other ways of looking at reality. This twist, sometimes poetic, often poetic, is above all sharp and precise.
Ultimately, Jocelyne Coster is obsessed with all possible human interactions. And thus, our place in the world and among our fellow human beings. A quest as personal and intimate as it is universal and political. Jocelyne Coster was born in Brussels in 1955. She holds a degree in silkscreen printing (Marc Mendelson's studio) from ENSAV La Cambre. She taught screen printing for several decades at the Académie d'Ixelles. She has exhibited regularly since the 1970s. A monograph, Identification, was published in 2013 by La Lettre Volée.

Muriel De Crayencour - journaliste

2011 – Identification – editor La Lettre Volée

TRACING OF THE AND GLOBE

In 2009 in the Boondael Chapel, Jocelyne Coster’s exhibition… I see a 2 by 2meter white panel, on which are left, on their own, black hand and footprints… Strange… And of course I don’t “see”, I “fail to see”, I am literally flabbergasted… But this “Etape” (“Step”) as the artist calls it, holds me back, precisely because of that: because it blurs the vision and cuts the words!

After all, the largest part of an artist activity provokes nothing else than the discarding of usage and utility, not to shelter in transgression (modern dead end) even less to satisfy in parody (post-modern dead end), but for a different « sharing the senses in all meanings » according to Jacques Rancière. This tempting expression of an artistic creation could also quickly become a passe partout that could very well invert itself: to share differently even down to insensitivity. Because, if it is or is becoming other, then this sharing falls into out of common insensitivity. No other joint sharing without space from common representation! An imitation or a copy never gave a true account of a painting, figurative or not. The misunderstanding or shunning of work of arts will always come of the gap, the big gap between the desire to share and the desire to discover the non-shareable. Was it not the case of the cave paintings? To re-present only presents again by facing what escapes the representation necessarily always already recognized. All in all, does it not appear that painting, as well as any other worthy creative art, always represents the unrepresentable, ever made sensitive but the insensitive, never shared the unshared? Otherwise everything regresses to insignificance…

Let’s come back to Jocelyne Coster, to what sensitized us from the eve in this big white space hardly bordered by traces… But what of? Their impact gives us a new sensitivity sending to time and space: to do this she grasped the earth… What we shan’t discover at a glance. No more than a word alone painting is never it, we do not apprehend a painting or its impertinence without following the path of experimenting it. Her works swarm with warm technical plasticity affects us. But in what ways and to what issue?

Itinerary: tracking the earth

1985 and later: it all starts with silkscreens which use various methods: accelerations which lengthens the image, taken by acrylic on canvas cut-outs from the book of ephemeris of the navigator and titled by the same name, or coming from “Aller-retour en 9 escales” (“Round trip with 9 stops”), photographs taken in flight from behind a microlight and connected on canvas titled “Ascendance”, enlarged cartographic landscape images printed and overprinted, from the station of La Louvière to the islands of the Philippines going through Long Island or Cuba, printed on paper, glass, canvas, wood… The artist already reflects the uniqueness of her “moves” be they by herself – her travels are everywhere and always she stubbornly heads to capture views of height (we have seen that if necessary, she does not hesitate to rent an air vehicle) – or whether in her work: photography, enlargement, application, colour, superposition of plans succeed with equal obstinacy. It requires, every time, to capture the space and re-write rather large surfaces, between 1,50 and 2, sometimes even 3 meters, of coloured shapes that overlap and meander and stretch: and give the impression of a time of space.
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Up to now, the recordings processed in multiple ways respect what they received, the views of land are certainly pretexts for transformed presentations, but they remain alone in question: of time tempered art space remains foremost space land, even in the form of a globe (the “Météosat” series of four boxes dated 1993 – but it should be noted that they are parallel to the birth and death of an infant) or a geographical map (that of “Eruption”) and nothing else. Even the Project for the Electrabel steam gas Tower on a tubular structure to bring out the bright spots offers the map of a city, Brussels, as the “Astrolabe” giant – screen printing on aluminium and stainless steel 5,50 meters high for the airport – peels the photos of the sky in spiral: “She peeled the earth like one peels an orange, says Chantal Talbot, the spiral of peel (the one with which one must make a wish) unfolds, opens and reveals its rings, its spaces empty and full”.

However, despite the brilliance of technical processes, the work retains a conceptual aspect – the commentators had already noticed – perhaps due to the photographic objectification in its receptiveness and repetitiveness Jocelyne Coster, precisely, does not stop there

Itinerary: track footprint

Because experience rocks – is it the real impact of birth and death that precipitates it? – heterogeneous elements burst into the work of the artist. In 1993, from random meetings with farmers in Jamaica, on landscapes photographs arise enlarged prints of the skin of her hand. Such fingerprints will therefore impose themselves, as in the silkscreen “Fayence” in 1997 where an enlarged thumb is overexposed. Similarly, in 1995, the “Solstice” series is crossed by newspaper articles dated June 21 or December 21 and selected by people of different nationalities.

The heterogeneous burst is none other than that of what is humane on earth!

But without any yield to pictorial reproduction; from land mapping to body impressions, unexpected analogy is therefore seen explored. To understand the impact, first of all let us rekindle our memory: an analogy is by no means a resemblance, it uses four different relative terms whose only relationship is identifiable by (A/B = C/D) or somewhat misused, refers to a common third one inverted between two unrelated elements (A/B = B/C)… And in 1998 and 1999, what the new silkscreens expand are finger or palm prints, immediately titrated with geographical terms: “Confluent”, “Fluvial”, “Océan Pacifique”, “Isola” and… Blues and Sienna, these acrylics on canvas have roughly the same dimensions as the previous large paintings, which further strengthens the analogy: the trace, the perceived brand! Voila: the painting of Jocelyne Coster has made us sensitive at what is always on move on earth, the furthest, as well as bodies, the closest – nature, wrote Whitehead, one of the leading Anglo-Saxon philosophers of the last century, is always “passage”. The passage imperceptible as such (from silhouettes of territories to fingerprints, both invisible to the common view – with its vision at the same time still and down to earth – including elusive light) has been given in sensitive sharing by setting cuts and coloured traces of paint. The importance of light transfigured by colour bursts then: the “Volare nel blù” series even offer a bluish coloration that invades the polyester film leaving barely drawn black and lightly golden marks who find themselves in the “Approach” series which, as taken during a landing (in the meantime, in 2001, “Take-off” series, footprint as of a taking-off), captures the mobility and the light at the same time. Painting does not imitate nature: it draws its colour and marks the footprint of the globe moving and bodies in evolution!

For what stake, finally? These recent years rush the possible answer by their exciting initiatives.

Geography of the skin and the earth are drawn in the same way (topography, dermography). Only a difference in scale between them. This report of similar structures between the infinitesimal and the infinitely large is found in all stages of life. What is very surprising in this graphic similarity is that we are born on this earth covered with a skin that is a reflection of geography we walk on (the skin on the earth) until the end of our lives, just when everything is reversed (the skin under the earth). And besides, do we not include the years on the earth’s geological, topographical curves and that of man in many of its lines and its folds?
Jocelyne Coster, “Le rapport graphique”, 1999

Itinerary: sharing tracks

“Coudée” (“Cubit”), “Empan” (“Span”), “Pied” (“Foot”): the exploration goes on, continues to surprise us, literally. It focuses on body parts, related to the measures before the invention of the meter, to constitute a self-portrait, for the least, a singular silkscreen printing on painted and varnished maple “3mains = 1 coudée autoportrait” (“3 hands = 1 cubit self-portrait”) shows a folding meter! But as precise it is, the fingerprinting never falls into a formality. In 2003, “Catastrophe annoncée” (“Announced disaster”) or “Adieu banquise” (“Farewell ice floe”) conjures up the rising waters in taking human footprint (the palm of the hand of the daughter of the artist reflects here). There is not even an analogy, but a common cause: if the large footprint through cartographic lines 155 x 150 cm is entitled “De Sienne à Outremer” (“From Sienna to Ultramarine”) it is to join the colour Sienna and Ultramarine blue, the members and the elements. Case heard: “Naître” (“Born”) on glass and wood, traces the cardiac monitoring of the child at birth approaching, red and dark blue swirl background, of a volcanic eruption. And its production entails the challenge to illustrate the four elements in twelve sequences from the foot of her daughter, Leila. Subsequently, five prints of her foot, between age 6 to 10, combined with wooden rulers or printed alone on a panel with white background or black on black…

No more than a formal withdrawal does it result in any individual dropping out.

Already encountered in the initial travels, the political dimension – in its original sense: the conditions of action that involves the existence in common, sharing – goes to the forefront in 2006. The occasion is given by the announcement of fingerprinting required at border crossings… “I am thus so caught up by the current reverse way, says Jocelyne Coster, because for several years I would send fingerprints back to geography and there they would ask them to travel around!” Her retort was not long standing; she decided to illustrate the “Article 13” of the Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and choice of residence within a State”. Duly noted.

Completed by the “Frontières” (“Borders”) series, the panels are brimming and overflowing marine blue and brown digital with a red line snaking care freely away from limits: open to infinity…

Jocelyne Coster, the itinerant wanderer
… and to “Mouvement perpétuel” (“Perpetual motion”), a wheel 2 meters in diameter with 84 gradients which represent the highest life expectancy on the planet, with a ring inscribed with the map portion of the northern hemisphere, place of this privilege: the “fun and educational object, says Vincent Cartuyvels, recalls the geography, the state of the planet and the north/south relations, it speaks of the human body, the golden number and perpetual motion”. It invites us to enter, including politically, in the footsteps of the world and the body!

In the Chapel of Boondael, mentioned at the beginning, this wheel stood in the middle of the room whilst on the walls and floors were exposed the tracks of hands and feet that had caused my shock or rather my initial divestiture…

… To discover the unknown is not a prerogative of Sinbad, of Eric the Red, or of Copernicus. Each and every man is a discoverer. He begins by discovering bitterness, saltiness, concavity, smoothness, harshness, the seven colours of the rainbow and the twenty-some letters of the alphabet; he goes on to visages, maps, animals and stars. He ends with doubt, or with faith, and the almost total certainty of his own ignorance…
Jorge-Luis Borgès and Maria Kodama, Atlas, transl. Anthony Kerrigan, London, E.P. Dutton, 1985.

Jocelyne Coster has never stopped and never ceases to screen print the traces that fit us in the world, as where already doing, since prehistoric ages, artists and shamans – two words that are applied to them in an anachronistic way – whose hand negatives we can still see on cavern walls. To strangeness is then added the emotion to receive such infinitely human and silent messages. With this contemporary work, strangeness, emotion, beget us again to receive in other ways the visible sharing of the unseen

Eric Clemens- - Philosopher

2010 - Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve

Proclamation of the Hall St Barbe Ecole de Polytechnique - UCL - 2010

The winning project is a typographical intervention directly linked to the function and architecture of the place.

"Décryptage", by Jocelyne Coster is composed of a series of words in English that are part of the usual vocabulary of polytechnics engineers.
These words will be written without spaces between them and upside down. The reading from right to left refers to Leonardo da Vinci.
The ceiling will be covered with poly mirror sheets, (except for the two windows overlooking the cross walkways) they will allow an extra light allowing the visitor a reading in place.
This decryption can be done from the ground floor or the bridge. The mirrors will simultaneously reflect the vocabulary and the comings and goings of students from an aerial view, seen from the ground. Thus, looking at the ceiling, one can perceive the multitude of skulls circulating from one classroom to another. By their presence alone, students will be an integral part of the facility.
At the end of the ceremony, the president of the jury, professor Marc Crommelinck, said that in his choice, the jury was particularly sensitive to the following points - EPL wants to highlight the student’s role as an actor: it is the student who is trained himself within an environment that EPL must make as rich and interactive as possible. The work of Jocelyne Coster appears very symbolic of this approach.
Reflection through the mirror makes the occupants of the hall Sainte Barbe actors of the work, and not mere spectators. This reflection reflects the image of a living environment that favors interactions between people. The chain of words reflected by the mirror appears to carry a poetic dimension. This poetic dimension strengthens the work and expands its aesthetics beyond the purely plastic aspect. The students' role as actors will be strengthened by the invitation to act as authors in order to bring to life the message conveyed by the words returned by the mirror. - Looking in a mirror is an invitation to question oneself. The words reflected by the mirror should therefore constitute interpellations inviting a questioning. It is symbolic that these interpellations will only be visible to those who look at themselves in the mirror.

2009 – Exhibition – Chapelle de Boendael - Scales

At the center of the space: a wheel 2m in diameter, into which a person can enter in the manner of Vitruvian Man. It is punctuated by 84 gradients, representing the highest life expectancy on the planet, that of Andorra. On the circumference of the ring, a portion of the map of the northern hemisphere is included: that of our comfortable latitudes...
Anyone can enter this ring and, like a hamster or a prisoner from ancient times, move it along the ground using their own energy...

On the walls, with similar dimensions, white panels, from which appear the black imprints of hands and feet, enlarged: the bodies are absent, vanished in this monochrome space, whether they are covered with a shroud, or drowned in the glare of snow and fog. Disproportions twist these human beings, reconstituted by the viewer. In these voids, we imagine them walking, meeting, carrying a child, mating, dying...
Arranged in a series, like an iconostasis, this hieratic ensemble speaks to us of the stages of life until death, with wrinkled epidermis, like that of mummies whose imprint has been preserved, but blown away by the blinding light of Hiroshima: immaterial.
At the center of space: a lively, playful and educational object to handle.
It evokes geography, the state of the planet and North/South relations; it talks about the human body, the golden ratio and perpetual motion... It will amuse children and families, and support the teacher's questions.

On the walls, shadows summon the memory and the imagination; silhouettes to be recomposed, allusions to our destiny, meditations on what remains of us, when we deliver only a few traces: does our passage on earth leave anything more than the fold of a hand, an imprint on a blank page?

Through a device that is both physical and disembodied, through the coherence of gestures that print, Jocelyne Coster questions the scales of time and space in which we are caught: between our intimate center of gravity and that of the world.

Vincent Cartutvels - art historian

2007 La Libre -21 March

Cartographic identity

Mapping is a way of representing the earth that can easily be applied to objects, for example.
Based on this fairly simple principle, Jocelyne Coster undertakes a kind of mapping of parts of the human body starting from an analogy: Fingerprints or other body parts offer many formal similarities with the level curves and ultimately determine an identity. By combining both cartographic and body data, it casts doubt on the image presented and ultimately proposes a mode of abstract representation of the human body that is nevertheless identifiable if one takes the trouble to undertake a scientific analysis.
In high-quality, intense color and precise silk screen works, translating flatness as well as space or relief, it passes from the corporeal universe to the terrestrial world in multiple interactions, an organ that can thus become an imaginary island. Insightful.

Claude Lorent - art critic

2006 - Exhibition Gallery Its art Ist

The word "minutiae": detail of no importance, say the dictionaries, even insignificant. And secondly, care given to the smallest details — but dictionaries are never up to date, and that's a good thing. The art of screen printing requires a lot of this meticulousness, but another meaning resonates here: in the field of biometrics, in the plural. The "minutiae" are thus the characteristic points of a fingerprint. The raw image from the scan, now binary, leads to another, derived from the digital analysis of the minutiae points. It results in a constellation within a coordinate system, which the calculation transforms into a virtual figure of identification. From the ridge lines — which separate the valleys — fingerprint recognition algorithms can thus create a map of identity. The extraction of minutiae allows for the isolation of bifurcations or terminals, which reveal the particular arrangement of the papillary lines of the digital drawing (dactylogram). Note that this process of abstraction has been accompanied, by analogy, by a vocabulary of lakes, islets, and deltas.
Biometrics has other resources, as we know, that resonate the idea of control; resonance intrinsically linked to mapping. The body and the territory have a long history in common. From the foot or the elbow to the iris or the voice, a strange tilting occurred. The body was the reference site for survey numbers and measurements, to describe and map the territory. Today, through new technologies, it is the subject of a hypercartography that gives the means to control... the comings and goings of bodies in space and time.
But these techniques have a poetic side, which escapes their empire, and that explore the circumvolutions of the hermeneutic. The imaginaries of the body and the map are innumerable and diverse. Especially in the movement that considers the gaze as an exchange of views. When micro and macro become entangled, the scopic drive produces images whose usefulness, in some respects, is critical. To take the image of a fingerprint and that of an altimeter map, and merge them into one texture, is, in the counterpoint of safety, talking about the skin and also talking about the place of the body. And it is talking about the mysteries that pierce appearances. At bottom, it is showing even the surface to say that it does not exist without depth.. And it is to remain on the surface to give free rein to decrypts

Screen printing represents masking. Its printing screens are screens, partially sealed, reading grids too, and partition frames. The precision of the medium, through the virtues of inks, accommodates the codes of repérage that work the colored fields in successive layers — the cards always have visible and invisible levels — and produce images of the world where we read images of ourselves.
Here, the graphs show ribbed expanses, age folds or landscape corporealities. In general, a map is an inventory of the situation at a given time, which is traversed mentally. When the considered territory is made of body parcels as so many places of recognition, other dimensions add and mix. Under the appearances, grains of reading planes and travelling essences, geonomies and geometries, anthropometric deviations and numerical effigies, specular abysses and dermal anfractuosities, discreet externalities and introjective proxemics, enunciative clutches and temporal gaps, slow cinematographies and latent signaling, mnemonic empans and matricial topograms, retinal topoy and heuristic schemes — tactile narratives and figurative readings (not forgetting what the blind see with their fingertips)...by a clever game of framing and scales, by transcriptions, and above all by the use of visual conventions; whether they unfold in series or atlas accentuates this spirit of method. But the variations on the codes have an amazing pictorial potential. The clarity of such a language seems to like puzzles. If these maps refer to the idea of fragments taken in a totality, they are emancipated from the observed to reach, beyond the questions of extent, to the duration and variations that are part of it. Thus they escape from themselves — chronos, nomos and graphein — their contents never giving up an aesthetic of being in the world.

Raymond Ballau - AICA – SCAM

2004 – Exhibition - The top of the maps I.S.E.L.P

Mapping on a human scale

For Jocelyne Coster, ‘The geography of the skin and that of the earth are drawn in the same way. There is only a difference in scale between them. What's astonishing about this similarity in graphics is that we are born on this earth covered with a skin that reflects the geography on which we walk (the skin on the earth) until the end of our existence, the precise moment when everything is reversed (the skin under the earth). And besides, don't we count the earth's years by its geological and topographical curves, and man's by the number of his wrinkles and folds? By comparing the geography of earth and skin, the artist tackles the theme of miniaturization and expansion. By enlarging her dermal imprints, which she treats like a geographical map, she places the infinitely large within the infinitely small.

In the series of five silkscreens entitled ‘Pacifique’, we see the undulating lines of the thumb, similar to contour lines and standing out in black against a brown background, bordering a blue expanse reminiscent of the ocean. Meanders are created, the wrinkles become islands, imaginary marine or terrestrial zones that are offered to us in a vertical view, as if we were flying over them. Jocelyne Coster invites us into a very personal aerial archaeology, where the relief and density of the land are highlighted by chromatic contrasts. Our mobile gaze can mentally travel along the lines, imagining ports of call. Curves, counter-curves, topographical accidents, the sinuosities of watercourses are all part of an unusual reading of the lines of the hand. In 1958, Piero Manzoni emphasised the obvious analogy between human footprints and topographical maps: he designed ‘Le Otto Tavole di Accertamento’, in which a map of Iceland and a map of Ireland are combined with letters of the alphabet and fingerprints. ‘The map of Iceland contains a number of place names and watercourses, as well as contour lines whose curves are reminiscent of fingerprints, which in turn can be read as topographical strata. In this work, where the imprint is read on the same scale as the map, Manzoni identifies the territory with the mark of the imprint, whose subjectivity is inoculated into the presumed objectivity of representation’.

We find the same personal ways of appropriating the map in ‘Coudée’, a silkscreen on paper mounted on canvas, light and foldable, like a road map. The artist uses a system of ancient measurements - empans, cubits, feet - to measure these bodily data. A cubit is a measure of length of 50 cm. ‘In this way, she takes us back to the ancient concept of space, which was meant to be integral to us. The journey on the ‘skin of the earth’ ends with a derisory exercise in anthropometry that empties men and women of all carnal substance. The body is no more than a series of abstract measurements in these singular self-portraits that reduce their author to so many folding metres. Jocelyne Coster, who examines our destiny after exploring unknown universes, still finds that we count the earth's years by its geological curves, and man's by the number of his wrinkles. It's as if there were a mysterious complicity between the depths of the earth and the very surface of our body-cosmos’.

All this microscopic, epidermal dynamism is clearly reminiscent of the terrestrial macrocosm in which we live. As Christine Buci-Glucksmannn writes, ‘As an erotic and melancholic object, the skin serves as a paradigm for a haptic foundation of art in which the surface, the border and the envelope become objects of experience and modalities for exploring time through an intimate cartography of the self or the other, as in Johns, Klein or Orlan. As Penone wrote in his Image du toucher, the skin is the body's identity card, but also an instrument for creating images, where the imprint is precisely the image of the envelope, a zero point and a point of departure.   In this respect, the relationship with time and death is substantial: the work, a frozen image of an imaginary world in its eternal contours, outlives the individual. It condenses the ephemeral, the elusive, the state of a body at a precise moment. In this sense, it relates to the memory of that person and echoes in that of the viewer.

The astrolabe is an instrument used in the old days to determine the height of the stars above the horizon. Jocelyne Coster gave that name to a three-dimensional work of which a monumental version can be seen at Brussels National airport. It is a spiral with a central plate and five concentric rings. A three-colour meteostat photograph covers both sides of the rings and the back of the plate. A sky chart is printed on its front, in gold on a dark blue background, with openwork stars that let the light through. The spiral coming down from the plate ends with an evocation of the Earth. It is evocative of travels, navigation, flights, clouds, and beyond, the stars. “It (the spiral) expresses the beginning of the circular movement coming out of the original point. It keeps this motion going ad infinitum: it is the kind of endless line that links the two ends of the future without interruption… (The spiral is a symbol of) emanation, extension, development, cyclic although progressing continuity, creational rotation”.The evocation of the incommensurability of the universe refers to the derisory size of our human condition.

The human condition is precisely what it is about in “Le Mouvement Perpétuel” (Perpetual motion). Jocelyne Coster made a model of a wheel on a human scale to be rotated by a man, like a hamster would. It consists of 80 wooden laths, symbol of the average life expectancy in our part of the world. Maps of continents are stuck on the outside of the laths. The idea is to show the ephemeral character of human life. Now you’re here, now you’re not… “The wheel has some of the perfection suggested by the circle, but with some valence of imperfection because it is related to the future, to continuous creation, hence to contingency and the perishable. It is the symbol of cycles, of constant renewal”. On the other hand, the perpetual motion refers to a machine which, once it has been started, could work indefinitely without fuel or any outside energy. The search for the perpetual motion can be summarized as the search for an inexhaustible source of energy, free and available to all.

Jocelyne Coster’s works carry numerous meanings, all of which are strongly linked with man’s central position in the macrocosm that surrounds him. They express a truly humanist perception of the world, with perhaps a secret hope, that of retaining a gesture, a passage, an existential track of the human being as an individual. 

Frédérique Margraff – art historian

2001 - Exhibition - galerie Artitude - Le Soir

A personal cartography

Ten years ago, the screen printer Jocelyne Coster (Brussels, 1955) was inspired by aerial photographs.She created a cartography punctuated by hypsometric curves.Today, she is abandoning the distant to explore her own fingerprints.It's all about the interplay of the infinitely large and the infinitely small.In Jocelyne Coster's case, however, there's a metamorphosis, and the undulating lines of her thumb are inscribed in black tracings that stand out against a brown complexion, while bright blue furrows evoke arms of the sea.

Tactile codex

Here we are contemplating a new, very intimate cartography that captures a very personal geography.Enlarged handprints can be understood as fertile vibrations.They set the pace for dermal wrinkles that become islands, peninsulas in a virtual sea.And the highly codified folds unfold.They invent imaginary marine and terrestrial zones.
Starting from reality, Jocelyne Coster imagines unknown strongholds. This sensitive geography draws on ancient measurements, empans, cubits and feet.The poetic drift is visual, and the tactile codex impose their writing, which is both strange and rooted in the body itself. In this way, Jocelyne Coster enriches her presence in the world.

Jo Dustin - art critic

2001 - L’Art Même

Anthropometry

From the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from the geography of the skin to that of the earth, from fingerprints to those of the universe, Jocelyne Coster explores pictorially and metaphorically the unfathomable connivance between the dermal and telluric depths. The cosmography of an inner world, through a series of works and a visual overflight effect at constant or decreasing altitude, is a way of capturing island geographies. From a scopic dive, invented worlds emerge, before these consubstantial relationships are decanted into a system of measurement in which the abstracted body appears only in terms of accounting data (the old measures of the empan, the cubit and the foot), and so folding meters, anthropometries and singular ‘self-portraits’ unfold in space.

Christine Jamart - art critic

2001 - Exhibition- galerie Miroir d'Encre

The perils of travel

Jocelyne Coster likes to get up high. About ten years ago, she was soaring through the air and photographing the earth from a plane. She then broke down the landscape seen from a great distance into a series of acrylics and silkscreens on canvas embellished with hypsometric curves. Today she is looking at her own body, comparing the geography of her skin with that of the land.
A West African people call ‘skins of the earth’, particularly sacred fragments of their territory: untouched places, withdrawn from common use, which draw attention to themselves by a small grove, a marsh or a rock. It is her own fingerprints that Jocelyne Coster is now proposing to confront with those of the universe. We walk on ‘the skin of the earth’, before entrusting her with our own skin, ‘the skin under the earth’, she observes carelessly, as if in jest. But these words reveal the very purpose of the undertaking: to confront the infinitely small with the infinitely large

The geographical exploration that began a long time ago is continuing on large canvases. Let me explain. The undulating lines of the thumb of the left hand (black on a brown background) border the blue patch of an ocean; or imprison the curve of a river. The ocean is clearly identified with the Pacific in a homogeneous series of five silkscreens, and the river meanders through five other panels.

Now let's experiment with the palm as a figure of an island discovered at very high altitude. We approach in four stages. Numbers indicate the height at which we are looking: 3500, 2500, 2000, 1500 feet.
The same palm print appears in black on a white background, bearing the date of the print and the realistic indication ‘left hand’.
The next print is colored: the palm appears in golden brown on a very bright blue background. The title (isola) indicates that we are invited to visit an island again. But this time we won't be approaching it; we'll be content to fly over it at a constant altitude in the next four figures, all the same size (volare nel blu). Jocelyne Coster is continuing, in a different way, the exploration of the ‘cosmography of the minor world’ that Leonardo da Vinci had begun when he set out to write a treatise on anatomy inspired by Ptolemy the geographer (a project that he unfortunately abandoned like so many others).
Third experiment. Using imprints of her skin, our experimenter uses ancient measurements to measure her body: the empan, the cubit, the foot.
In this way, she takes us back to the ancient concept of space, which saw it as being one with us. The journey on the ‘skin of the earth’ ends with a derisory exercise in anthropometry that empties men and women of all carnal substance. The body is no more than a series of abstract measurements in these singular self-portraits that reduce their author to so many folding meters. Jocelyne Coster, who examines our destiny after exploring unknown universes, still notes that we count the earth's years by its geological curves, and man's by the number of his wrinkles, as if there were a mysterious complicity between the depths of the earth and the very surface of our body-cosmos. But she says all this with her unflagging smile, in good humor, inviting us to laugh. We are free to worry.

Luc de Heusch - antropologist - professor U.L.B

1999 - The graphic relationship

The geography of the skin and that of the earth are drawn in the same way (dermography topography).There is only a difference in scale between them.
This similar relationship of organisation between the infinitely small and the infinitely large is found at every stage of life.
What is so astonishing about this similarity in design is that we are born on this earth covered with a skin that reflects the geography on which we walk
(the skin on the earth) until the end of our existence, when everything is reversed (the skin under the earth).
And besides, don't we count the earth's years by its geological and topographical curves, and man's by the number of his wrinkles and folds?

Jocelyne Coster

1999 – Le Soir

‘Doublés voyageur’ at the GPOA

..... ‘This time, Jocelyne Coster (Brussels 1955) is exhibiting large paintings with a computer-generated silk-screen structure and intense colours: blue, red, yellow and black. Far from being a newcomer to the picture rail, she has demonstrated a real mastery of appropriating and mixing techniques. Her previous exhibitions consisted of aerial paintings of a beautiful poetic quality, which seemed to scan the surface of the earth to pinpoint only physical, mathematical and astronomical data.

She gradually incorporated skin imprints (fingers or other body parts) into these transparent constellations. Then these imprints were enlarged, monumentalised and systematised, invading the whole field of the painting and revealing through their alluvial deposits a new geography of the world.

Abstract, inevitably graphic, these strata form labyrinths, meandering rhythms that enclose within their network a new type of landscape evocative of genesis. It's like reading between the lines of a hand...’.

Daniele Gillemon. - art critic

1999 - IN ENVIRONMENTAL n°19-20 I.S.E.L.P. - Site of the present

Astrolabe’ at Brussels National Airport

‘She peeled the earth like you peel an orange, the spiral of the peel (the one you have to make a wish with) unfolds, opens up, reveals its rings, its empty and full spaces. She had decided to set up a sort of great ‘astrolabe’ in an airport, that of her country.’

So says Chantal Talbot in her exegesis of Jocelyne Coster's work, inaugurated last May. ‘Astrolabe’ is in fact the name given by the artist to her sculpture, which unfolds in a stairwell over two floors. It refers to the instrument that was once used to determine the height of the stars above the horizon, and which is now used to estimate times and latitudes. It also evokes travel, navigation and flight, as well as clouds and the stars beyond.

The design consists of a spiral propeller made up of five concentric rings and a central aluminium plate. The front and back of the rings are printed with a three-colour meteosat photo, while only the back of the central plate is covered.

On the front of this tray, the artist has reproduced a golden astral map on a midnight blue background, pierced by several star shapes of different diameters that allow the light to seep through. From this plate descends a stainless steel spiral, printed with the same motif on both sides, ending at the bottom with an evocation of the earth. The work is bathed in light from a large bay window which, depending on the time of day, may or may not make the stars twinkle.

It is installed in the area after customs, so you will need a ticket or pass to see it.

Environmental p.148

1990 - Exhibition - Galerie Miroir d'Encre
Like Icarus

Claustrophobic, Jocelyne Coster clung to the wings of Icarus to escape the anguish of the Labyrinth. She glides through the air at a reasonable altitude, thanks to flying prostheses: the ULM system (a Delta fitted with an ultra-light engine). Freed from the feeling of suffocation, solidly moored to the clouds, she photographs the earth with that distant gaze that is the beginning of art (and ethnology).

As the aircraft, piloted by a companion, moves very, very slowly, she cuts up the landscape beneath her feet into a series of fragmentary images that can easily be reassembled later in an arbitrary, more or less zigzagging alignment, to reconstitute a kind of metamorphosed figure of reality, which is the second stage of the artistic process. But it's all too easy to stop there. The photographs, placed end to end, are printed on a large canvas using the screen-printing technique (which accepts any medium, including paint). Then comes a third approach, which consists of making these fragments of reality, torn from the earth, more real than life, by projecting onto this little piece of the universe, captured from above, the hypsometric map that corresponds to it below, freely combining aerial photography and geography. Finally, we add a few clouds in acrylic to make it even more real.

It's an unclassifiable, mythical approach that attempts to mediate between Heaven and Earth, an approach that is heralded from the outset by the lawnmower-like noise made by the Deltaplane's ultra-light engine, without damaging the clouds.

Here are a few examples of this singular, utterly original work,
which reconciles the abstract and the concrete at bird's height. A railway line snakes along. The contours of the route are printed on a pane of glass placed on the canvas, so that they appear to have been extracted from the ground.

The Plate Taille lake shows a shoreline: the dividing line between the land and an artificial basin. The hypsometric map sticks to the landscape on which it is projected. The contour lines even sink into the blue surface, reminding us of the ghostly existence of the village that was swallowed up by the dam (it is said that you can still visit it in a diving suit).

Here is an important triptych, complementary to the previous work: the Eau d'Heure dam, seen from three different angles, still as the crow flies Delta. This time the composition is discontinuous (the photographs are not connected) but unity is re-established by the projection
The composition this time is discontinuous (the photographs are not connected), but unity is re-established by the projection of the architectural plan that is the origin of the building and which here replaces the hypsometric map (the survey drawn up after the fact, when Nature has finished - temporarily - its work).
Or these first attempts: various routes to get from Brussels to Brussels by flying (at satellite height) over a map of the world. Fragments are cut out of it, arranged as you like, according to various curves (since the earth is round) and printed - again using the same screen-printing process - on Japan paper, which is then pasted onto the canvas.
This space, continuous but fragmented, is welded to the time zones; it bears the mark of the day and hour when its composition was completed: while day reigns here, it is night there (or vice versa).
Icarus, barely out of the Labyrinth, has broken his face. Jocelyne Coster swings gracefully through the air, with a kind of smiling gravity that makes you dizzy.

Luc de Heusch - antropologist - professor U.L.B

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1990 - Exhibition - Maison de la Culture – Namur

It's no secret that Icarus, trapped in a labyrinth, escaped thanks to wax wings. Ovid's legend can serve as a metaphor for Jocelyne Coster's artistic approach. Here is an artist who literally ‘takes off’... Impatient to escape the confines of our terrestrial space, she takes flight, and it is in the air that her creation begins. In a microlight, she flies over mountains and plains, villages and railways and, from the top of her intangible peaks, tastes a space and time without moorings, punctuated by her own movement through the air. Floating senses... The landscape becomes a state of mind, and its meanders trace the capricious drift of the imagination away from the claustrophobia of reality.

As soon as photography was invented, Nadar took to the skies in a hot-air balloon to photograph Paris. During her flights, J. Coster took several photos of the same site. Back in the studio, she lines them up edge to edge, each photo continuing into the next, and prints them in silkscreen before reworking the canvas in acrylic. Contrary to the instantaneous time of photography, J. Coster inscribes duration in the simultaneous space of the canvas through the plurality of shots of the same place, thus unfolding a trajectory in space-time, an itinerancy in the visible. In his first work, ‘Ephémérides’, he placed maps side by side, some of which, stretched out in a long rectangle, suggested, through their chromatic blurring, a real crossing of space-time.

The objectivity of the medium (photo, map) is thus deported into a relative time and space that leads to an imaginary journey, but one that originates in existing places. In his views of the South of France, the pictorial work contributes to this designation through ochre colours that evoke the heat of the country, contrasting with the luminosity of the blue of the sea. J. Coster brings out the relief and visual density of the land, in a kind of aerial archaeology, in which she marks human landmarks (villages, churches) with touches of colour, underlining the undertow of a landscape that becomes an inner geography.

All her work weaves together the rational data of science and the imaginary data of art: photography is a mechanical recording process which, in this case, also records a topography. While J. Coster emphasises the unevenness and geological roughness, she often inscribes figures in her landscapes, marking the altitude or degrees, which amplify the geophysical rigour of the space, while giving it a conceptual, abstract dimension, since it is not a question here of simple representation, but of a temporal process. The title of a series of works, ‘ascendance’, clearly expresses the duality of the work: ascendance is both a concrete term of flight and a concept. Poetic indeterminacy arises from topographical precision itself.

While the photographs are linked together to form the work, the canvases continue in series, causing the viewer to move physically, recomposing the successive stages of a journey, an incursion into the relativity of space and time. On either side of the canvas, the clouds in the foreground open up, inviting the viewer to put themselves in the artist's position and plunge into the air. The pictorial work creates both this proximity and a sense of distance: we don't approach J. Coster's work head-on, as is usually the case for a painting, but from a slight overhang - and therein lies one of its original features: in the angle of view required, which doesn't just draw the eye in, but also creates an almost physical sensation of space that expands all around and extends towards infinity. Moreover, J. Coster clings to a landmark that runs through the entire canvas: a line (road or railway) stands out, a white incision, from which we can only see .

Aerial photography is thus combined with cartographic surveying: the photograph gives an account of a material configuration, represented abstractly by the map, thus bringing together two different ways of approaching reality. In the smaller-format silkscreens, the planimetric lineaments of the map are silkscreened directly onto the glass, which thus becomes a plastic element, giving rise to a play of visual interference between the planes of transparency and opacity.

The reduced scale of the plan takes on the dimensions of the experience superimposed on it. J. Coster multiplies the readings of reality to make them merge: photo, map, silkscreen, painting, so many ways of demonstrating the arbitrariness of our codifications, as already stated in the first works on time zones. The object here - the place photographed - is elusive and elusive, and the stratifications that cover it make it both distant and desirable, partly hidden by the clouds celebrated by Baudelaire's l'Etranger and towards which Jocelyne Coster flies.

Marie-Ange Brayer - art historian