Artists in residence

INTERVIEW

Graduating from ESAM Caen/Cherbourg in 2019, how has your practice evolved since then and what has your residency at the Cité internationale des arts brought you?

“Graduating from school is an equally challenging and exciting time, I was lucky enough to be able to live at the Cité internationale des arts for a few months, just three years after graduation. When I landed in the heart of the Marais in this incredible place that is the Cité, I was very excited to explore the city and discover new things. After three years of post-graduation, I had understood the need and the important place that artistic practice takes in my daily perception. The Cité, close to many resourceful places, offered me a time of reflection and intense observation. My practice of sculpture and drawing has become even more sensual and fragile. I am interested in the impact of time, the old age that eats away at us, and I like to confront this brittleness with jewelry, often more flashy than precious, a sign of dominated or dominant desire. The Cité has brought me encounters, ramblings and a working space in which I have confirmed this plastic research mixed with my writing practice. I was able to meet with critics, authors, curators and discuss this hybridization text sculpture.”

In April 2022, you participated in the group exhibition Weirdo Rainbow at DOC space. To what extent did your residency experience at the Cité internationale des arts inform your participation in this exhibition?

“Paris is a place of incredible encounters, and the Cité internationale des arts allowed me to have a studio apartment within this artistic abundance. I shared a lot of time and thoughts during the Open Studios, openings and parties in other alternative places with other artists including Audrey Aumegeas and Loïc Leclercq, who are two resident artists at DOC.

From these reflections, we built with two other artists, Marine Coullard and Vincent Girard, a collective exhibition thought, edited, written, by young visual artists. We wanted to think, with a certain melancholy at times, about cohabitation, the fleetingness of appearance and the fragility of our projections. In a certain way, this evokes the difficulty that one meets as a young artist as much as this incredible will to share human and artistic things. Without this chance to be together, in the same place, we would have experienced things differently.”

As part of your residency at the Cité internationale des arts, you had the opportunity to participate in the Open Studios: Work in Slow Motion and to open the doors of your studio-dwelling to the public, what did this experience bring you?

“I opened my studio on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2022, I was able to show sculptures in progress and drawings. The discussion with very different personalities was enriching and allowed me to confirm certain choices. Showing a work in progress in my studio allowed me to think about my sculptures in a more radical way. The swarming of the research during the opening of the workshop allows to affirm the desires that can contain certain forms in gestation. These slight shifts that one notices only when they leave the daily context of the workshop.

Beyond the extraordinary opportunity to invite people who are important to me and to discuss the work, it is also an exercise in distancing and affirmation in my research, which tends to be very bulimic. For example, I showed a piece of absorbent cotton decorated with safety pins during the open workshop. This piece finally found its weight at the Weirdo Rainbow group show in DOC. Without this open studio stage Hermine, would have been different.”

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Roubaix in 1996, Charlotte Delval began her studies in art school with a communication option in Cambrai before finishing with an Art option at the École Supérieure d’Arts et Médias de Caen/Cherbourg in 2019. This anchor point constitutes the essence of her work, a weaving between literature and visual arts.

In residency at the Confort Moderne in Poitiers for five months, his work mixing eroticism, secretions and sculptural forms, takes shape in a group exhibition To all these corpses retaining the appearance of life. The notions of time, aging and a certain slowness contaminate her forms forcing them to a soft erotic violence induced by secretions, smells and other haptic sensations that diffuse in the air like a desperately stifled cry.

Charlotte Delval’s work reveals a resilient universe, constantly constrained by the body and seeking to escape to come and die, and in the process, fertilize new space-time.  

After this experience, her research and creation continue and are notably presented in a first solo exhibition at the Bains-Douches in Alençon, in 2021 Let’s twist Again accompanied by a self-published text.

In 2022, she is in residency at the Cité internationale des arts for five months where she takes part in several group exhibitions. Today, she is based in Rennes, where she participates in the professional training GENERATOR, 40mcube.