Temporary Art Exhibition in the ACP Sanctuary
Opening: 6 October 18h – 21h
Exhibition: 7 October – 7 December 2022
Schedule visit by appointment.
With Les moires reflètent un miroir sans fond, Camille Bruat honors the American Church in Paris’s three Art Nouveau stained-glass windows made in 1901 by Louis Comfort Tiffany. In relation to the sinuous, curved stained glasses and the changing colors of the church, Bruat’s drawings take on a stark black contrast to the immaculate limestone of the walls. In an unceasing dialogue, they float – suspended in the alcoves of the church.
Les moires reflètent un miroir sans fond © Camille BruatDuring the Middle Ages, glass was used for the mystical purpose of introducing light into interior spaces. Light then became legible through the glass. The picture on the glass was imbued with spiritual light and reflected a few meters further onto the architectural surfaces, in real space. Even if the gap between the historical figures referenced on the stained glass and the various skills that erected the church tear us away from the present, the experience linked to the sensation remains unchanged. We can discover what we are by projecting our experience of here and now into these suspended patterns. By soliciting touch, a whole imagery of the tactile arises – burnt velvet, mirror, leather, metal...
So many mediums question our relationship to our environment. They refer to a whole range of industrial objects aimed at imitating nature. The flat areas of Bruat’s drawings can, at certain times of the day and according to their environment, be imbued with yellow, red, purple, and consequently extracting colors of their environment. Because they are juxtaposed with two black mineral pencils, one matte specific to black stone, and the other graphite with silver reflections, they exacerbate the reflection of light. They underline the ambiguity of the boundaries between materials, volume, temporality, and light that play out between our images and reality. In a place steeped in history and craftmanship the drawings become the time’s coloring of the building.
CAMILLE BRUAT
Born in 1993, Camille Bruat is an insatiable explorer. She roams the city as her research laboratory through which she experiences life and the urban space. Whether she is inviting visitors to wander around the bend of In-Situ conceptual lines in abandoned places, exploring the perception of the city by its citizens like a treasure hunt, or reactivating the memory of the former Nanterre School based on the principle of mobility, her expeditions require the total commitment of the body. Drawing and sculpture intertwine in a permanent back-and-forth motion. Her work in space proceeds from a sensitive interaction between places, works, and spectators, while her graphic production raises an imaginary tactility that involves memory, observation, and slowness.
Since the lockdown, Camille Bruat has been drawing by locking herself in an obsessive production whose key word is slowness. Through a carnal plant – the idea of an urban space, black, metallic, oppressive, polluted, cold, that she walks down daily – is evoked. The first one, Le Buisson, realized in 2020, is the representation of a teeming jungle overflowing on all sides. This all-over, on a human scale, immerses the viewer in the infinite detail of an oil-soaked plant. We find ourselves in front of this bush-world, in the heart of the bowels of the earth. This world seems vertiginous, nature seems to have taken over. Zoomed and fragmented for a second project, Le buisson morcelé created in 2021, it reproduces in the form of a mosaic of 45 drawings some fragments of the project Le Buisson in the manner of a puzzle that can be modulated infinitely. These small, light papers fly away on contact with the visitors. Thus, the random score of the movements that we activate with the wind is created. The third part of this project is called Les Flaches, 2022. This term borrows an urbanism word, which refers to the puddles of water stagnating on deformed asphalt. These reflect the forgotten of the city like the birds, the branches, the sky... The ones that we can see, once the state is of strolling is activated. This third project is an enlargement of the first image. Thus, moving away from a realistic aesthetic, she approaches the very substance of the drawing. A way of sublimating the experience of her environment, of subtracting empirical rationality through abstraction.
Graduated from the Bourges Fine Art school in 2012, Camille Bruat participated to a group show at CEAAC in Strasbourg and at IESA of Paris in 2018. She was also invited in 2019 by the collective La Carosserie to create a solo show in a car parked near the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris and later she exhibited in a partnership with the Greek artist Athanasios Kanakis at the Openbach Gallery. Recently, she was invited to present her drawings at Rendez-vous aux jardins orchestrated by the Culture Ministry. In 2021, she was selected as a finalist at two competitions: for the Pierre David-Weill Drawing Prize and the Don Papa Art Program Prize. The following year she was again selected for the ICART Artistik Rezo Prize.