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Recent Work |
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Christine Mathieu was trained in photography and graphic arts at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In 1989 she set up a graphic arts studio called l'épicerie. The specificity of her work is its focus on cultural and institutional subjects.
She has also been exhibiting her personal work since 1996, work that comprises an uneven mix of photography, graphic arts and installations. In her words "semantic and aesthetic gateways open up naturally between my artwork and my activity in graphic arts. In my images, I try to create a space where the eye alights on what is familiar but where the nature of recognition must remain enigmatic. By using the mysterious language of symbols I can address the hidden part of consciousness that all of us have in common.”
Her photography falls very much into the “plastic arts” category, and to implement it she creates specific spaces that she "perfects" using digital techniques. Christine Mathieu explores the essential experiences of life: birth, desire, life and death are the driving forces behind her photographic work.
She works along the tenuous line that separates the body and the mind, the visible and the invisible. Disturbing and mysterious, these pure and sensual images are based on the materiality of both the body and the flesh, while at the same time questioning the limits of this materiality.
When it is obvious, the visible introduces the concept of the sacred. “I am borne by the intuition that matter is alive and animated with a cosmic intelligence." The sacredness of living things, which is so precious to the artist, is heightened in certain images by the dramaturgy of signs that materializes on the surface of bodies and offers itself to the spectator.
"This imaginary sphere, nourished with graphic and metaphorical elements, lets some of the innermost secrets of our being escape." Charlotte Lorant |
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