Perched in the Vaucluse, the artist Charlotte Culot deploys an art of living that is both rich and elementary. His colorful energy is expressed in his paintings and a carpet publishing project, "Rhizomes". Encounter.
Head to La Roque-Alric, a picturesque village between the Dentelles de Montmirail and Mont Ventoux. This is where the artist Charlotte Culot lives, alongside Hannah, her assistant, and Urals and Indiana, her inseparable horses. It is also here that she recharges her batteries, draws her inspiration and works for a good part of the year. "I divide my time between the Vaucluse and the wild coast of South Finistère, in Brittany. La Roque Alric is the rock, the fire. I find a vertical energy there, while in Brittany, I horizontalize myself thanks to the ocean. I need both to find my balance."
At the heart of this natural spectacle, Charlotte Culot divides her time between her hermitage — a doll's house with a panoramic view, with a simple decor, but with well-chosen elements, a plot punctuated by small cabins where she organizes parties and equestrian shows —, and the Maison Rhizomes, a new project hosting her studio, a kind of Art Room open to the public where she exhibits her latest creations and an apartment for artists in residence. "La Maison Rhizome allows me to open my universe to an aesthetic community: you can come there in residence, by appointment and, above all, to exchange there."
Art as a legacy
Daughter of the Belgian ceramist-sculptor Pierre Culot and the artist-illustrator Micheline Wynants, Charlotte Culot was born in Belgium and, from an early age, was nurtured by a plural creative language with, on the one hand, the work of the material of his father and, on the other, the practice of drawing and painting of his mother. "I lived in a highly artistic family melting pot. I think we children grew like weeds, but beauty was always present on a daily basis: for my parents, it was a perpetual search."
If Charlotte Culot began with the practice of photography, immortalizing decomposing walls during her various travels, the artist ended up swapping her camera for paper, glue and scissors.
"Rugs are the result of a human, animal and plant chain."Charlotte CulotArtiste
"At one point, photography was no longer enough. When I started painting, I I was more 'Matissian', making still lifes, then it became abstract, and now it's pure color," she admits.
Close to the American Expressionist Colorfield Painting movement, Charlotte Culot paints flat colors with gouache that she makes herself with pigments. Then, she builds her paintings like architectures, in the form of collages, by assembling cut-out pieces of color. Mixed techniques that allow him to create real colored fields, free, structured, open and whole.
Rhizomes
In parallel with her activity as a painter, Charlotte Culot has developed a collection of knotted rugs, "Rhizomes", handmade and in limited series in Nepal. "Rhizomes is an extension of my artistic practice. It is a human, animal and plant chain, and the carpet is the result of this whole chain. Often, we say that it is decorative art, when it is total You have to imagine that you go to the Tibetan highlands, at an altitude of more than 4,000m, to get the best wool, the one that is on the animal's back. dries, spins and dyes. The same goes for cocoons of silk, linen, hemp."
A project that will soon be punctuated by an edition of cement tables, to cultivate your own "rhizomes" such as Japanese tokonomas, and a collection of mosaic walls, in collaboration with the artist-mosaist Jérôme Clochard. "Fragment after fragment, matter will reorganize in a cosmos to end up in a work of light." An extremist work, for an artist full of resources.
www.charlotteculot.com
The works are available at Amélie, Maison d’art. www.amelie-paris.com
