“TRIPLE NEWS FOR VISUAL ARTIST BARBARA CHRISTOL”

Article from November 24, 2024, by Anne Devailly

Nîmes-based visual artist Barbara Christol, who works primarily in painting, drawing and weaving, has three main areas of focus at the end of 2024.

• She is participating in the Contemporary Art Fair of Design St-Art in Strasbourg, with the Parisian gallery Art Trope Gallery, which will present her work along with the works of three other of her artists.
  ST-ART, Contemporary Art and Design Fair, November 29-December 1, 2024, Strasbourg (France).
• Barbara Christol also has a new representation contract starting in January with a New York gallery which is due to organize an exhibition for her in spring 2025.
• Finally, she is engaged in a new collaboration with a professional musician from Nîmes, Fabien Tolosa, with whom she has been composing the duo Farbara since 2021. The duo is currently working on a project related to memory (immersive plastic and sound installation) in partnership with France Alzheimer Gard, patients and caregivers.

Inner landscape, © Barbara Christol 2021

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From a young age, Barbara Christol grew up surrounded by the arts and developed a passion for drawing. She trained at the Beaux-Arts de Nîmes and subsequently attended several painting studios to perfect her techniques.
She continued her training in art history at the Sorbonne, earning a doctorate to develop her own artistic and aesthetic research.
Barbara Christol’s pictorial work has become more distinctive over the years, developing a visual practice centered around balls of wool. She creates series of ephemeral weavings that she exhibits in institutional settings, in nature, and in private spaces. Thread is always present in her paintings, either physically or through the omnipresent use of line. Figuration and abstraction intersect on favorite themes: space and play. Geometric figures imbued with poetry move through landscapes, mountains, and architecture, all underpinned by the lines of constructions that act as threads in the compositions.
Barbara Christol’s works are regularly exhibited and are part of private collections in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Artistic Approach: Barbara Christol views creation as a labyrinth, in which the artist advances at the crossroads through trial and error, chance, and repetition while maintaining a common thread.
Deeply attached to the artisanal aspect of her work, the Painter vacillates between figuration and abstraction. Lines are omnipresent in her works, serving as the bridge between the two, the common thread for her. Barbara primarily uses classical and traditional techniques, which she mixes and adapts with more contemporary ones. Barbara Christol weaves and unweaves a body of work whose subjects endlessly intertwine in a play of solids, voids, and thin lines. The Painter offers architectural universes highlighting an optimistic perspective on the world, where Barbara Christol’s place and her gestures act as a revealer. (Art Trope Gallery is directed by curator Virginie Tison.)

Anne Devailly (editor-in-chief of Artistes de France)