artist  statements

Nathalie ALBALADEJO

MULTIMEDIA

I work mainly with ink and walnut-stain, so close are these media to the natural world from which they are derived.

I explore all the possibilities they offer : the contrast between matt and gloss, the way they catch the light, their transparency, anything which evokes the visual effects encountered in nature.

How to capture my emotional response to trees, plants, light dancing through branches, or reflections on water without being a simple copyist of landscape, a mere transmitter of impressions !

I navigate this fine line between the real and the unreal, the visible and the invisible.

I like observers to be a little destabilised by my work, the eye having to interpret rather than just see, or simply having to give up and take its pick of whatever pleases it.

This is what has always motivated me to find unusual formats, creations inside and outside a framework.

Fabienne PERCHERON

PHOTOGRAPHY

The Murmur of the Wind

The series « The Murmur of the Wind » is an invitation to a poetic walk in the forests of the Landes region and their surroundings, our senses awakened by the wind-swept treetops sighing overhead, shedding on us the gift of their delicate perfume.

I find inspiration in Chinese painting and ink drawings from the tenth to the fifteenth century. My aim is to arouse sensations.

The photographs in this series are the result of a work of alchemy. Traditional black-and-white prints are modified by manipulating the photographic emulsion, softened by chemical reactions. I may blow on them, or use a pin or a brush, or a swirl of water... the final effect is achieved experimentally. Sometimes a coppery tone appears, sometimes an iridescent effect. Each print is unique.

« The Murmur of the Wind » invites the observer to pause and step into a new world.

Manon BERTHELLOT

CERAMICS

Cellular composition is at the heart of my ceramic creations. Inspired by living organisms composed of divided cells, each unique but co-existing in a symbiotic relationship, I recreate an infinitely small world : imaginary concretions seen close up, sometimes even as seen through a microscope, fragmented in the manner of fractals.

Earth and fire are my means of expression, evoking and prolonging my emotions. In creating around an empty space I aim to suggest life and its movement by imagining an organic world, part vegetation, part mineral, part coral, part floral...variations all paying tribute to Life.

 These unique pieces in porcelain or stoneware clays are hand-modelled using the pinch-pot method, then fired at 1300° or even higher in an « Anagama » wood-fired direct-flame kiln for at least fifty hours. During this time the pieces gradually accumulate a deposit of molten ash, thus acquiring spontaneously an ash glaze.             

CHAHAB

PAINTING - SCULPTURE

Chahab was born in 1951 in Teheran . He left his native land at the age of 22, taking with him all the mysteries of a thousand-year civilisation. His desire for knowledge and for fresh encounters led him to study in different cities-- Nice, Marseille, Aix. His work has the colour and savour of a traveller's tale.

He has lived and worked in the Pyrenees since 1998, renovating a former mill , the Minoterie de Nay, to create an Arts Centre there.

Ever-curious, he has mastered a range of artistic techniques, with the objective of inventing new pathways between them. The desire to pursue an artistic project and the endless surprises of creative work are at the heart of Chahab's approach to the visual arts.

His personal development lies at the intersection of painting, sculpture and a range of printing and reproduction techniques. Brought together with discernment and imagination these elements have gradually come to define his creative achievement.                           

MARJEANE

TEXTILE SCULPTURES

Textile Writings

Marjeane lives in the hills to the north of the Béarn, in the Pyrénéés-Atlantiques department.

She is an activist for a poetics of thread.
She weaves and binds threads into jungle-vine lianas. She draws with them outlines and shapes in pictorial space. She plunges into the language of colour, heads off into the wide-open spaces of whites, flirts with the irascible incandescence of reds, so powerful when they side with pinks, travels far in deep blues with no thought of return.

She explores the territories of the sensory world, which we all share and which are the basis of our humanity : from the familiar to the unknown, from the joyful to the unquiet, from the openly declared to the unsaid. This exploration requires the close study of form. She is not looking for formal beauty, but the thread pathways she draws between the lianas and weaving constitute a single domain, in which the twisted lianas deride any idea of delicacy and take off in a wild race, running through the veins of the work in gestation, ready to hatch or explode, waiting for the intense moment when new life awakens.

 Sophie BLANC

 BOTANICAL GILDING

The fragile and the invisible

The works of Sophie Blanc immerse us in the atmosphere of a meadow in June, where one lies down to observe the blades of grass in the breeze.

Sensitive to nature, she picks plants, memories and light in a single movement.

On the dried plants, she applies gold leaf and pigments to reveal their beauty.

Her seed pod thus becomes a tribute to nature and our intimate relationship with it.

The fragile and the invisible take on a sacred dimension, and it is this awareness of peril and transience that gives her works their power and nobility.

Sophie Blanc invites us to a contemplation that is both simple and profound, between naivete and maturity, full of poetry and delicacy.

Hélène LACQUEMENT

PAPER ARTIST

Hélène Lacquement seeks to highlight that which is often the most innocuous and overlooked in nature, far removed from majestic beasts. Experimentation is at the heart of her approach, which often incorporates recycled paper.

With precise gestures, cut, inked or mounted, combined with mixed techniques, the paper takes on volume and becomes the cuticle of an insect, or mycelium or elytron.

According to Anne Devailly*, blurring the lines between art and nature, the artist's work “resonates with current concerns about the future of the planet”.

Based in Perpignan, the artist regularly exhibits in the Occitanie region, and in other countries such as Germany in 2024, at the International Paper Triennial ‘Global paper 6’.

A member of the Contemporary Artists Collective in Perpignan, Agit’hé, she is also developing artistic mediation projects in the region for all kinds of audiences.

* Les 30 artistes 2022, Artistes d'Occitanie, 2022

Anna AMODEI

ENGRAVING

Nature fascinates me. It moves me with its complexity and perfection. Imposing itself discreetly, it constantly proves its intelligence.

Between randomness and absolute coherence.

For me, there is nothing more to add, everything has been said, whilst at the same time, I have a desire to contribute, to get closer and to pay homage to it.

The work of engraving seems ideal for this. It combines precision and technique with the random and the unknown. It requires a succession of meticulous processes, each of which holds an infinite number of possibilities.

And the work, born of itself, is the result of these processes.

During my walks, I nose around, picking up old sheets of metal, rusty and eaten away by time. On them, one can read a subtle dialogue between the object created by man and nature reclaiming its rights.

Flattened, smoothed with a disc grinder and sanded, these metal sheets serve as a support for my engravings. I then try to ‘sneak in’ my drawing to propose a new dialogue, a new story.

LÔ

GLASS & PAPER

Poetic writings of glass and paper

At her studio, Lô creates a singular work, an alchemy, where writing, ink and transparency interact.

Lô lives at Rivel, in the Kercorb region, in the Pyrenean foothills. She walks footpaths, attentive to the voice of the earth… Back in the studio, as poet and glass-artist, she combines words and matter, transparency is her medium. She embodies in luminous layers the successive moults which disrupt landscapes and men, epidermis and the earth’s crust, imprints and inflorescences drawn into rifts of light.

By mixing the art of fire and ink on paper, she unveils a translucent geology, where plant imprints, graphite tenderness, grains of lava and greyness are superimposed.

Her works reflect a writing of fusion, a mixture between poetry and matter.

 Bernard BOUYÉ

PHOTOGRAPHY

Thalassa border

An irresistible desire for captured subject matter to make the digital more carnal.

Photography is at its core and the decompartmentalising of borrowed effects.

My taste for material and nature allowed me to test a number of environments… and gave birth to this series, consisting of recomposed seascapes.

The horizons are not linear, the materials reinforce my vision of the world.

From the edges of the beach, the sea invites contemplation, the coastline, this limit where the land stops and moves towards another place, deep and mysterious, a perpetual movement that replenishes the spirit and the body and invites poetry.

On the seashore, one is alone, all and everything at the same time.