Artists in residence

Lolita Bourdon was born in 1996 in Saint Denis de la Réunion. She began her studies in Cape Town (South Africa) in Fashion Design, then returned to the fine arts of Reunion Island in 2015. She joined Jutta Koether’s painting class for a year at the HFBK in Hamburg, Germany, and obtained her DNSEP in 2020 with honours. After several residencies (Friche 2020, Jardin d’Eden 2021), she won the grand prize at the Tropical Drawing Festival on her native island.

Using painting and drawing as her main medium of expression, Lolita Bourdon feeds off everything that surrounds her, making no distinction between sources, no boundaries between genres, schools, movements, classes, or eras. Everything is reset to zero, there is no nobler subject, more just or more profound than another. The whole of her environment becomes material for painting. The studio is, for her, a primordial place. It is in doing, experimenting and especially in failures that she can find her energy. She has to construct, reconstruct and deconstruct images. She listens to her painting as a devotee would follow his religion, and thus tries to explore the different paths it opens up.

Gradually her painting is filled with signs and symbols, which she aims to simplify. It is no longer a question of abstraction or figuration, of representation or imagination, the journey has more value in her eyes than the finished work because when everything is finished́ she just has to start again, over and over again.

Recognisable by her flamboyant palette, her painting is meant to be a free exploration of form and colour. She thus attempts to question, not without humour and provocation, our conceptions and presumptions about our surrounding reality, challenging the vision of a coherent world, of an era that makes us see all kinds of colours, and also the very nature of the artist.

She sees her work as a space for reflection on the act of painting, of looking, and in particular on the multiplicitý of points of view depending on who is looking, when, where and how. What should we show? What should we hide? Are there still prohibitions in the art world? These are questions that often come up in her practice. Hungry for images, she picks from art history without hierarchy, spontaneously, like a pastry chef who mixes different ingredients to make a successful recipe, and make the cream rise without it turning to butter.

Nelson Bourrec Carter is a French-American filmmaker and visual artist. He lives and works between Paris & Los Angeles.

His practice combines photography, film, installation and performance while his research revolves around the links woven between real territories and fantasized landscapes, influenced by the weight of popular imagery. His work focuses mainly on the influence of American iconography on identity construction and racial awareness, and operates from places whose hybridity, history or architecture lend themselves to a new interpretation.

His films have been shown in festivals such as New Directors/New Films, Entrevues Belfort, Vila do Conde, in historic institutions like the Cinémathèque Française, but also in art centres such as the MacVal or the MoMA in New York.

In 2020 he is one of the recipients of the Science Po Prize for Contemporary Art, and a recipient of the national photographic commission Image 3.0 by the CNAP and the Jeu de Paume.