« Le géant et le vide » (« The giant and the void ») - Opening Ceremony
Charlotte Van Kemmel

After studying at the Caen School of Fine Arts, Charlotte Van Kemmel is best known for her drawings, although she also creates sculptures and films.

Whilst her art is deliberately figurative, the subjects are not always immediately recognisable. She enjoys capturing reality as she perceives it on social media, on the radio, whilst cycling around Paris, during her yoga sessions, or after Wednesday evening Zazen at the Grande Pagode in the Bois de Vincennes.

Alongside her gouaches depicting people marked by a labourious and precarious existence, she also creates more enigmatic works whose subjects spring from her imagination, or which transform everyday life into a dreamlike world blending animals, object-like bodies and hybrid forms. Gouache – simpler, more direct, fragile and inexpensive – allows her to maintain an accessible and modest practice.

A master of colour, she works with vivid, contrasting and intense palettes. Her use of colour, watercolour and gouache in particular, brings her closer to painting, which she sees as a field for experimentation. Her drawing practice is imbued with a sense of abstraction: she explores form, mass, negative space and positive space. At the same time, she seeks to construct a narrative, sometimes drawn from the unconscious, within a state of constant tension.