artist  statements

Claudine COUGET

PAINTING

With a strong architectural training in the spirit of the Bauhaus movement, and alongside her work at the CAUE de Hautes Pyrenees (Council for Architecture, Urban Planning and the Environment), Claudine Couget exercises a practical approach to art.

Through her visual work, she chooses to shake up and question the relationships and compositions of our environment. As in architectural works, the space (and its support) is a place of action and becomes a means of communication.

Surfaces, lines…clarity, simplicity and unity.

She chooses to use just a few colours, sometimes only white.

Pronounced by the horizontals and verticals, the shapes are cut out and the lines are sharp to catch the light and introduce a slow or lively rhythm, regular or irregular.

Simple geometry emphasises the balance of lines, shapes and colours.

From the need to express the third dimension, folds are born, and the picture is created with the alternation of lights and shadows, solids and voids.

Jean-Michel RIBEYROLLES

SCULPTURE

My universe is deeply inspired by the Neolithic world and the large-scale representations of the first traces of man: dolmens, menhir statues and imposing cairns. Who were these builders, and with what techniques and knowledge were they able to create these forms ? It is the silence that surrounds these questions which is the source of inspiration, dialogue and research. And more recently, the charm and spirituality of 11th and 12th century temples in Japan.

My sculptures form a constellation of points, like an outstretched arc linking us to these unfathomable origins, to nature and to space.

I like to allow myself to be guided by impulses. The sculpture builds itself gradually as it goes along. With the effects of light playing with the black of the wood licked by the flame, the orange gradations of the Douglas fir, the silvery reflections of the steel, I always seek to create transparency.

Cécile BEAUPÈRE

PAINTING

The body, again and again (extracts)

Since the beginning. Over and over again. She draws the body. The body over again. Always, endlessly, stubbornly, as if her life depended on it. And indeed, perhaps her life does depend on it.

Cécile Beaupère draws the body, and more than just the body, what is wrong with it. Not the dead body, the corpse, the inept rag, but what bites the body, what spurs it on and leaves it panting, what brings it back to life: its jolts and sideways jumps, its twitches and shudders, its pulsations and palpitations [...]

A being that life carries in its "breath", in its spiral. A body caught in the act, a body painted from life. Caught up in life. The drawing touches the point, cuts to the chase, gets to the heart of the matter. The subject is wholly subject. It is neither object, nor pretext, nor motif. It is an individual in its full individuality: the pure equal of the one who draws it [...].                                                    Jean-Louis Roux

Jean-Patrick MAGNOAC

SCULPTURE

Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1958 and trained at the École des Monuments Historiques, Jean-Patrick Magnoac lives and works in Samatan, in the Gers.

A sculptor for some forty years, he has worked in the restoration of historic buildings, architecture, cabinet-making and stone-cutting.

His approach is a quest, a constant search for strength, balance and harmony.

For some years now, he has been working in a new medium called La Trame, which brings together two traditions: sculpture and painting. La Trame (half-tone screen) consists of a plastic support with holes, lines or dots, of varying sizes which allow light to filter through onto a surface creating shades and gradients of the same colour, over which the artist then draws or paints.

Jean-Patrick Magnoac, winner of the Camille Claudel prize in 1989, has exhibited at Flaran Abbey, the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Mirande and other private and public venues.

He has won several public commissions.

In his studio, open to the four winds and bathed in a light where shavings and splinters glisten, he works his materials, creating three-dimensional artworks.

 Jeanne ANDRIEU

 CERAMICS

As a ceramic artist, I explore the sculptural beauty of  plants and coral, drawing on their vulnerability and sensuality for the creative spark. My sculptures are inspired by both familiar and exotic plant life. I am inspired by representations of fauna and flora of marine depths, even by backgrounds for certain video games, discovering worlds of fantastic and colourful vegetation.

I enjoy spending time in botanic gardens and hothouses, or on walkers' paths. I observe, classify, and draw plants. The infinite variety of patterns textures and colours fascinate me. I'm interested in aesthetic considerations, I arrange, try out colours and forms, create mutations. The act of drawing is an independent part of my creative process. I observe with tenderness my hybrid creatures while they transform themselves, finding their way freely to their place in my dream world.

Helen HILL

COLLAGE

My work is intended to invite observers «to go on walkabout», to awaken our curiosity by showing the instant when light reveals a different facet of the familiar. When our attention is captured, nothing is static, neither light nor vegetation nor the mineral world.

Paper collage has always been my main technique, and Nature my inspiration. All sorts of salvaged paper, repeatedly worked over, pliant, guide the creative process. I prepare the graphic image on the paper according to the inspiration of the moment.

I use mixed techniques in my collages: paint, ink, pencil, pastel, impression, engraving, monotype print, rubbing... I prepare the papers then tear them up to reconstruct them, rather like Nature itself advances, new life gaining nourishment from the old. Certain motifs emerge, recur and resemble each other without ever being quite the same.

Antoine RAULT

GLASS  SCULPTURE

I started working with glass in 1999 and have been a glass artist since 2011.

Trained in different techniques I now favour glass paste, using a casting technique for creating sculptures by moulding.

My main inspiration is Scandinavian glass art with its simple forms, sometimes textured or with facets, which allow me to play with the optical properties of glass.

Glass is a difficult substance which you must learn to understand; once tamed it is a revelation and a gift of magic.

Alain ALQUIER

SCULPTURE

Bois de Vie (The wood of life)

I live in the middle of vineyards, rolling farmland and woods.

More than ten years ago I introduced the idea of Nature into my painting by choosing the theme of the cep, the thick woody stem of the vine, in a series entitled «Bois de Vie». The title came from reading about the Sumerians, who called the vine «the wood of life». This corresponded exactly to the direction my paintings were taking at the time. I try to express strength and fragility, turbulence as well as calm-- all the ambivalence of Nature itself. Massive imposing forms are paired with background sources of light shrouding them in an indefinable aura.

The choice of a subject of Nature just outside my studio is a voyage to a familiar land, where I have often walked without really seeing it. Breaking old habits is a source of innovation and helps to conceptualise elsewhere in a new way. These ordinary subjects right in front of our eyes are endlessly powerful ways of firing the imagination.

Élisabeth LOMBARD

PAINTING - SCULPTURE

Games of style and content

Tools are rudimentary but the image has evident semantic depth. A sort of instant archeology, strata upon strata. A game of artistic second thoughts, exposed or hidden.

A game of familiar exoticism, an expression of private musings, flirtation between man and beast. An inevitable cohabitation for an artist cradled in the Mediterranean world. Frames from a silent movie that talks, building up a repertoire of signs rather than an identifiable bestiary, forging a highly personal mythology.

Echoing a voluntarily mannerist approach, forms of Tribality in wood, fiber, bindings, and clay come to life, using a vocabulary of masks, charms, statuettes.

«The art of other cultures knocks at my door: noses, mouths, eyes collide not out of cruelty but to free up the artistic gesture, contained but still rebellious, and to express a new exoticism. What is inspired tinkering for Claude Lévi-Strauss is disapprenticeship for the artist».