In one corner of the studio lies a mound of yarn balls, purchased back when the artist was studying in Paris, from a shop near the Sorbonne that was liquidating its stock. That was before the residency in Chile, before the collaboration with choreographer Kirsten Debrock, before returning to Nîmes—her birthplace, ultimately chosen as the territory of her studio. Soft wool, blue like childhood. An intimate azure, an emotional homeland—or rather a “matrie,” as Chateaubriand called his Breton roots. In paintings, the sky only became blue in the Middle Ages, as historian Michel Pastoureau reminds us, with the rise of Marian devotion. At the time, blue was seen as a warm color—elevating (a royal symbol) and consoling through its light.

In Barbara Christol’s practice, this blue—slightly faded, as if by time—redraws spaces through acts of weaving and unweaving; softening the edges of a table, a staircase; personalizing standardized environments—as during a long-term residency in a middle school, where students were invited to reclaim a space imposed upon them, and which many had come to resent. During lockdown, the artist explored online tutorials in search of new techniques: she embraced a thick, fleshy knit that doesn’t seek a motif at all costs. Loose enough to embrace without smothering. A blanket—always made from the same reserve of wool—that nestles into architecture, cradles the body, heals and comforts, in the spirit of Beuys, before returning to the studio to fill the void—or rather, the absence.

I Wish You Were Here

Blue now emerges in geometric paintings. An eruption of emotion into a world of matte blacks and sandy browns drawn with precision, creating a subtle dissonance. A shift in palette accompanied by a freer gesture, daring more organic loops, drawn freehand where compasses—of which the artist has a collection—once dictated the composition. Graph paper (often preserved since school days, in a kind of affective ecology) welcomes a new register of sensitivity, a fresh fragility brimming with vitality. Dunes, pyramids, arithmetic games, sketches of cities or cosmos come to life, rekindling the memory of the painted surface. A living memory, not an archive. A gesture that expands as the canvas grows—its size contingent on the studio space—a way for Barbara Christol to tame the frame, she who says she “loves drawing in painting (which still intimidates her a little), and vice versa.”

Now working with composer and musician Fabien Tolosa, and in partnership with France Alzheimer, she seeks a shared language to express illness—her mother’s—loss of identity, and the possibility of other forms of presence in the world. Conceived as nomadic, the upcoming installation MEM.MORI brings together found objects and sounds as fragments of autobiographical narratives without beginning or end—anonymous memories stitched together. Neuroscience now tells us that memory has no fixed seat in the brain, that encoding involves neural connections—this tentacular network—and chemical exchanges. MEM.MORI operates through and for circulation, a small factory of interaction, the starting point of a mediation project that will later travel to hospitals and care homes. A way to “respond to what happens,” borrowing the words of Vinciane Despret about the New Patrons program. A response that might overflow the question. A fabulation.

Céline Piettre (journalist and art critic, La Gazette Drouot)