Christine Enrègle (1973, Suresnes, Paris), earned her PhD in Visual Arts from Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne University, with “first class honours”, in 2008. Since then, she is professor of visual arts at the Condé school of design, in Paris. While writing her thesis, she was awarded university scholarships to study in Brazil, at the Fine Arts School of Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais). She took part in several group exhibitions and organized solo exhibitions.
Her artistic approach raises the question of the Practice of landscape, considered as a material, whose elements once collected, displaced and transformed, constitute the matrix of her installations. Highlighted during the time of an exhibition, they appear as so many clues of the sites that were crossed.
The drop shadows that they generate invite the viewer, in turn, to lean “on the features of unknown, of an other or an elsewhere.” (Mehdi Brit). This displacement of botanical material can take the form of drawings made with charcoal on canvas.
The work planned for June and July 2019 at Hangar will pursue the one initiated in August 2018:
“Portugal, and particularly Lisbon, appeared to me as an intermediary space between France, where I live, in Paris, and Brazil, where I lived for a time, in Belo Horizonte (State of Minas Gerais). What grabbed my attention here, in Lisbon, is the presence of certain trees also met in Brazil. Discovered at random during walks in various public gardens in the city, they impose their presence with the gigantic scale and their phantasmagoric forms, fostering both the imagination and the memory. The movements of their metamorphoses are translated with charcoal on cotton canvas, through a set of gestures, which operate as their extension and accompany their displacements in order to give space to the drawing. Realized in series of three, in the form of triptychs, then presented on a wall at a height of two meters, the dimensions of these drawings (150 x 80 cm each) resemble those of the human body, engaging the spectator inside a disposal in mirror.“
This work will be shown during an individual exhibition at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes in Lisbon, in April 2020.
With the support of the Institut français du Portugal.