Heinzer Reszler Gallery is delighted to present Sophie Bouvier Ausländer's 5th exhibition at its premises. For the second time, her works will be shown in a new space in the heart of the city of Lausanne. This 5th exhibition provides an opportunity to put into perspective the development of her practice concerned by the making of the world and its mise en abîme.

The series of paintings that gives the exhibition its title was named after the fact, like the red that emerges a-posteriori from the surface of a green fruit. An apple is climacteric, its ripening continues autonomously after the harvest, and so does my work.

Of Pythagorean inspiration, climatérique comes from the Greek κλῖµαξ, klĩmax, the scale. Climatérique (climacteric in English) describes that which goes by degree, by step. It is a critical period in human life marked by major changes, such as puberty, andropause and menopause. The climacteric state is therefore part of the journey of certain living organisms. In this word I also hear the contraction of climate and choleric, a climate pushed to the limit or the collision of the human scale and that of the Earth.

Act II, which the gallery opens in its new premises corresponds to Act II of my life. There's nothing very scientific here, but rather an inventory of a body in a space.

Three series are on show: Climatérique, Call me Ishmael and Three Guineas.

The first series, initiated ten years ago, was based on geographical maps. Since then, a cotton canvas has replaced the printed paper. While the evocation of relief remains perceptible in Climatérique, I focus now on pictorial elements that persist despite the disappearance of the map. Cotton induces other gestures, more forceful and intense. The dimensions inherent within the fabric, whether physical, symbolic or semantic (textile, text, texture) play their part. The white waxed canvas, once stretched onto a frame, transforms into a coloured mappa mundi. This tablecloth in my kitchen performs as a membrane between two worlds, a painting of the everyday life, a Penrose stairs.

Call me Ishmael, the second series consists of paintings: these sorts of shadows cast by a sculpture behave as indirect discourses. The sculpture-matrix appears like a twodimensional ghost, but remains unexposed in the flesh. Call me Ishmael is the first sentence of Loomings, the inaugural chapter of Moby Dick. That text, tinted with biblical hues, weaves a net that captures my imagination like the grid of a notebook traps types. Tossed about at the whim of a mad captain, Ishmael speaks to the reader. The first three words he utters could be mine. Loomings originates in loom. The shadow of the net unravels while disclosing between its two parts a horizon actual and just as threatening as that of a fiction.

Three Guineas insitigated the third series of relief sculptures. Virginia Woolf wrote this pacifist and feminist essay in 1938, as Europe, in the midst of the rise of fascism, was drifting towards war. Woolf examines the ways in which the private realm is political, and how patriarchate excludes women from public life in British society. The text questions issues that are still very relevant, which infuse my work, though unable to provide answers. What shall I do with these three guineas today? The artworks, made of string, newspaper and covered in ink are then ringed with tin. The ink shines, the movement arrests, the metal holds one grid to the other. Then a disc rises like a moth-eaten sun.