November 07, 2017

Meet at Camille Cottier’s Studio

Camille Cottier works in Saint Ouen where her studio is located.
Camille is a young French artist born in 1990 in Paris, graduated from the Beaux-Arts d'Angers in 2013.
She lives and works in Paris.
His early works reflect research into the physical and possessive limits of the body (his own, that of others).

From 2014, she began an instinctive and obsessive work on Les Bonshommes, a vast series of full-length portraits of naked men, almost identical, facing us.

In 2016, she participated in her first group exhibition with the Lazarew gallery.

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The creation of the figures was based on instinctive work that turned out to be obsessive.
They are not there to talk about a specific event, they would rather be an accumulation of emotions, anxieties, fears but also peace and hopes.
"They can bear witness to a contemporary society but they also seem to bear the weight of a burdened past.
They are my outlet."
They proliferate, overlap, accumulate but are not concerned with each other; they do not look at each other, they address us. They question us.
Who are we, what do we do?
We are in some way the spectators of our audience. The frontal positioning of the characters underlines this duality between the spectator and the drawing.

Their faces could just as well be those of a woman or a man, yet each has a male genitalia. They do not seem to have an age either. Neither child nor old man, they seem to know the past as well as the future.

The absence of hair and fur reinforces this questioning of identity. Smooth, similar but yet not identical.

The men are together, in a group, they represent a mass, a community. However, there is one thing I cannot figure out: is it an individualistic, frozen and anxious community? Or, on the contrary, a kind of very united, serene and calm family?

I wonder if these observations would not rather be a questioning of our functioning, our way of life.

The feeling of mass is represented by the accumulation, the superposition of the characters. "They are one on top of the other." This is when the aspect of pattern appears. The character repeats itself, indefinitely.

It repeats itself until saturation, until it defines the format. Nothing is decided beforehand. By dint of repetition, the character becomes a motif.

He has the power of the chameleon: he blends and dissolves into his own universe, almost disappearing in some places.

Sometimes we hardly see it anymore, but it is very present. It is a motif that sometimes hides but always stares at us.

Camille wears
-Tilda jeans
-a Carla denim jacket
-Leïla velvet pants
-a burgundy Marion jacket

Written by Elise Chalmin

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