Faroe Islands — Olivier Catté
A Landscape Felt, Not Represented
What immediately strikes you about this series is the complete absence of the picturesque. Catté doesn’t paint the Faroe Islands—he transcribes them. No identifiable cliffs, no peat villages, no golden light. Instead: raw sensations, meteorological forces translated into gestures, inks, and rubbings.
Rain as Writing
One of the striking images in the series (#12) resembles a musical score. Tight vertical lines—like strings of rain—run across the entire composition from top to bottom, while undulating forms evoke the swell or the low clouds clinging to the Faroese cliffs. It is a notation of the weather, in both a meteorological and a musical sense.
The Island as Minimal Presence
In #1, a dark, dense mass settles on the horizon—an islet, perhaps, or a basalt promontory rising from the water. All around, the paper remains white, scratched, splashed. The island is not described: it appears, as if emerging from a graphic fog. This is precisely the feeling of the Faroe Islands seen from the sea—the way these black lands seem to spring from nothingness.
Water in All Its Forms
From one work to the next, water changes state and register: vertical rain, stylized waves, granular foam, sheets of liquid ink that spread and dry, leaving rings. Catté seems to have observed the water of the Faroe Islands from every angle—and sought a different technique for each. Pencil rubbing, splashed ink, diluted wash: so many ways of being in the perpetual humidity of this archipelago. A palette from the ends of the earth
The cold blue-gray, the black of India ink, the white of the exposed paper, a few touches of electric cyan or pale yellow at the bottom of the frame (#7) — this chromatic range is that of the Faroe Islands themselves: a diffuse light, never direct, always filtered by clouds and sea spray.
What the series as a whole says
These works are not travel souvenirs — they are imprints. Catté allowed the landscape to work on him, and it is this action that he conveys: the pressure of the wind, the sound of the water, the density of the air saturated with humidity. The residency functioned as a sensory immersion, the physical trace of which is preserved on the paper.
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