Camille Bernarab-Lopez

Jan 6

Because Camille Benarab-Lopez favours variety, she disorients us in the images to become a better depository. Through this gesture of appropriation and recycling, the artist-alchemist fights against the inflation of images and her own impossibility– her lost pain–of realising her own. Enticed by purity and order, worried by excess, she tries to contain the flow of icons with her steel-edged windows: she encircles them by surprise, creating incongruous dialogues, as the frame adds a meaning that always overflows.

A taste for secrecy responds to this obsession with order. Its perfume emanates from the nebulous aura of the works that the viewer is invited to discover, even if it means bending over. The artist arranges her tiny treasures, arouses curiosity, weaves the disparate to reveal clues, such as the note written by her Spanish grandmother. Abstraction flirts with the figurative, and the visual oscillates on the threshold of visibility. The work gives rise to a series of waves in which the images are successively hidden and revealed. The outline of a hand can be seen here, the outline of a page there, before everything is swallowed up by the mauve melancholy.

Through this modest attitude of love, Camille Benarab-Lopez reveals herself by hiding in the sheets of signs that she composes.

Ysé Sorel

Translation Katia Porro