Stèles & Berceaux

Stèles et Berceaux is a solo exhibition of Raphaëlle Bertran, winner of the Darmo Art Prize 2024.

Exhibition text

What remains after a rupture? Fragments, visions, the remnants of a changing world? "Stelae and Cradles" captures this pivotal moment where history unravels and reforms under the prism of myth, where the pure energy of the gesture precedes meaning. Raphaëlle Bertran explores the dazzling instant of creation, a state of tension where hand and body invoke archaic figures and primal visions.

Raphaëlle Bertran's paintings are permeated with telluric and cosmic forces, evoking primordial storms, snippets of collective memory, and continuously transforming inner landscapes. At the intersection of history and myth, her work engages in a timeless quest, a dialogue with humanity in its rawest form. Inspired by ancient tales and mythological figures, she probes the persistence of archetypes and their resurgence in a world perpetually collapsing and rebuilding.

Fragmentation is at the heart of her approach. By forgoing preparatory sketches, Raphaëlle Bertran allows an unstable universe to emerge where meaning eludes, where each work is traversed by halos and successive erasures, the traces of foundations that gradually fade.

Raphaëlle Bertran's canvases summon the imagination of grand war frescoes, epic battles, and totemic female figures. The cave, a matrix space and sanctuary for humanity, becomes an ambivalent motif: a place of refuge and withdrawal, but also of vertigo and revelation. Between instinctive gestures and mastery of materials, oil painting and spray paint contribute to this tension between appearance and disappearance. The figures that haunt her canvases are spectral, fleeting, witnesses to a world in perpetual convulsion.

Each work opens a fissure into a mutating universe, where chaos and order coexist, where matter is in tension. The sun, a recurring motif, oscillates between a vital force and an apocalyptic threat, between light and blindness, presence and annihilation. In this instinctive and visceral painting, where matter becomes language and the gesture a thought in action, "Stelae and Cradles" draws us into a shifting universe, where the history of humanity is replayed in an eternal return, between bursts and ruins.