The objects are arranged on slightly elevated platforms, they attract a movement of the eye and body toward the bottom, a form of introspective contemplation.

Evoking interior spaces and domestic gestures, the minimalism of their layout charges them with an aura liberated that liberates them from their triviality and confers them with a spiritual quality.

Rolls of paper, ceramics or wooden stalks seem to be artefacts of a ritual we are not free to attend.

The paintings and installations of Sophie Bueno-Boutellier present themselves as harmonious and minimal compositions in which the colours invite meditation. Yet their delicacy and apparent tranquility conceals tensions.

We guess at those tensions in folded paintings.

Three layers of cloth are run across and linked together by acrylic, creating a rigidity, subjected to pressure. Fixed in their chosen position, the foldings seem at first docile and aerial, eclipsing the constraint within which they are maintained.

 

In the exhibition “The Don of Gaïa”, the tension is more subliminal, since it is relational. Reflection on maternal experience, the artist abandons her authority over the future of her work by ceding it to her partner. This collaboration bears witness to the power relations operating in our professional and familial spheres. Drawings of their child are integrated into the work and underline that the being-mother and the being-mother inform the artistic position.

The entrance to the studio on cours Lieutaud marks, in itself, a renewal.

 

The acrylic is now applied upright, in a series of gestures realised just after a session of meditation. Painting becomes indissociable from subject, it bears witness to an outpouring of being, all whilst aiming to transcending the ego to become the expression of a vital energy and feminine force.

 

Aurélia Defrance