- Would you introduce yourself in a few words?
I am Cécile, I’m 26 years old; I got a degree (DNSAP: National Superior Plastic Arts Diploma) from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris (Editor’s note: National Superior School of Fine Arts) in 2012.
In studied in Tadashi Kawamata’s workshop, a Japanese artist I like a lot (his work and his personality yeah). I had the chance to go to Japan with him in 2010 and in 2011 I left for Berlin, to the UDK (Berlin’s Fine Arts School).
Once out of the Fine Arts school, things were a bit rough, I didn’t have a workshop anymore and I quickly found myself working in production (FRAC and McVAL…). It was an intense experience but it led me to want time for my personal practice even more and find a workshop to make my own things happen.
In 2013 I was selected by competition and portfolio for the post-graduate program AIMS (Artiste Intervenant en Milieu Scolaire or Artist Working in a School Environment) for the year 2013-14 (residency and program in partnership with ENSBA, the Edmond de ROTHSCHILD Foundation, the city of St-Ouen and the National Education Service) Thanks to this post-graduate degree, I got a workshop and a grant, so I can give my all to my passion almost full-time, sheer happiness.
I applied for the Emerige Revelations grant and to my surprise my portfolio was pre-selected. We were only 12 young artists out of 1,000 portfolios to be given an exhibition with a prestigious curator in a very unusual location: an old mansion in the 16th “arrondissement” (district) of Paris.
- Where does this interest for modern art come from?
I don’t know. Very young I was already interested in art and I’ve never really wondered why or how. I feel closer to modern art than to contemporary art.
I need to feel a human presence in a painting. I’m not particularly sensitive to works done on a 3-D laser printer where the artist never touches the piece. I guess I’m old-fashioned, almost closer to crafts and the taste for work well done.
- Who inspires you?
Architecture, the cubists (Braque), Gordon Matta Clark, Clay Ketter, Richard Artschwager, El Lissitsky, Pipilloti Rist, grandmothers.
- Why Formica?
First it’s a revealing symbol of a time. It had its finest hour in the middle of the 60s and was the emblem of modernity during the 50s, 60s and 70s. Everyone remembers a cup of coffee or a piece of cake shared in the half-light of a grandmother’s kitchen… The artist plays on this popular, familiar memory that the subconscious brings out. Yet, this feeling of strangeness, a moment of hesitation quickly come to the surface: we are really in front of a spatial incoherence, in front of a freedom grabbed through this “reminiscent reality”.
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