États de surface

Caroline Vicquenault is a figurative painter who graduated from the École Supérieur d'Art et Design de Toulon Provence Méditerranée, where she obtained a Master's degree in Fine Art (DNSEP) I paint surfaces like going through a state. The surface is not a background. It's a skin. It keeps the memory of gestures, of repeats, of what has been covered without disappearing completely. Each painting is built on this tension: making it appear, then retaining it. The forms are reduced to the essential - a horizon line, a stretch of water, sometimes almost nothing. They are not subjects, but points of balance. The image holds on to very little. It could fall apart. The sea comes back often. Not as a motif, but as a condition. Unstable and changing, it eludes fixation. It is both surface and depth, presence and withdrawal. What is at stake here is not a narrative, but a state of being. A state of painting, and an inner state. The layers accumulate, shift, filtering out what lies beneath. Mourning, motherhood, the tensions we go through - all these things surface without ever being named. I don't try to resolve it. I leave the painting at that precise spot: where something appears and continues to waver. Caroline Vicquenault