BARBARA CHRISTOL “RESEARCH CREDIT”

Fred’ Magazine Winter 2024. Article by Marie Mazeau, editor-in-chief and journalist.

Wrapped in the old blouse of her father, a jeweler, she has the air of a researcher and her large workshop, of a laboratory.

This artist, physically engaged, engages in an unconditional search, between figuration and abstraction, favoring gesture over line, creating spaces and landscapes, constructing a universe, suggesting perspectives, and attempting to architect the world: “Fed up like all the people of Nîmes on ruin, on a world that shifts and disintegrates,” she confronts the passing of time and unwinds itself.

She tells a story, unwinds her ball of yarn, weaves a web “with an artisanal gesture,” and the azure, intertwined woolen sky overlooking the studio entrance is the first chapter: “I’ve traveled a lot, I’ve had to imagine nomadic creative systems like photography and this woolen thread, through weaving, installations, and ephemeral spatial arrangements.”

Passionate about drawing, a student at the Beaux-Arts in Nîmes since childhood, she graduated, attended several workshops to perfect her techniques, but the History of Art is so vast, the plastic and aesthetic research so considerable… she never stopped immersing herself in it, at the Sorbonne, until her Doctorate. A researcher to the tip of the pencil, to the end of the brush: “I love technique above all but I also like side steps so I do several things at the same time and I navigate from one to the other. I advance by trial and error, by repetition – this is how series, narration are born – and according to chance.” Acrylic paint, graphite, charcoal, India ink, colored pencil, graphite, various media, plumb line, and compasses by the dozen… and this line, Ariadne’s thread, that composes her geometry: simple shapes, a precise gesture, which she invites, as if by defiance, to a play of scale and light, of perspectives, vanishing lines, to infinity, of origami, contrasts, and kinetic effects: galaxies, constellations, constructions… her landscapes literally capture the eye and, willingly or not, carry it beyond known spheres and limits: “I start from constraints, from imperatives that I set for myself and freely circumvent. What I seek is a plastic harmony, an emotion in a form, an ideal of perfection, but it’s not that rigorous.”

An artist in motion, always ready to combine her gesture with the step or voice of another, Barbara Christol never ceases to question creation. A pianist, passionate about tap dancing, she names her works after pieces of music and, because “I am part of tradition,” she has exhibited every year since 1862, “to confront what sells,” in Paris at the Salon des Beaux-Arts and the Salon d’Automne.

Her works have been included in private collections in France and the United States.

Portrait of Barbara Christol in her studio, © David Richalet

. The artist will exhibit at Art Capital at the Grand Palais next February. www.barbarachristol.com