One winter morning about 25 years ago, Charlotte Rampling watched her husband, Jean-Michel Jarre, paint an abstract picture in the conservatory of their house in Croissy, Yvelines. The sun trickled through the blinds, there wasn't much planned for the day and she said to him, "I'd like to do things with my hands." He replied, "Go for it!" At the time, the actress had never done any painting or drawing. She had a deep respect for masters such as Pierre Soulages and Alberto Giacometti, but was paralyzed when faced with a blank canvas herself. Her first drawings were "desperately childish." But she was persistent. Christmas went by, then January, and still Rampling kept going on the same small board coated with white paste, spreading clusters of paint with her finger. She experimented with the primary spectrum, then abandoned it, because "the colors were too loud." She moved on to greens, blues and grays that become darker and darker. Misty tints, burnt sienna and deep blacks eventually prevailed.
"But still nothing came out of it," said the actress, "so I started scratching and then scratching more and more furiously. I let myself be guided by something – I'm not sure what – and I knew that something was going to happen." By dint of rubbing the canvas fiber with her thumb and the flat of her hand, a figure appeared. It was an almost human silhouette, transparent and without a face, "something very psychological, connected to my inner world." "The figure emerged from the material after resisting for a long time and I could no longer erase it," explained Rampling. After this apparition, she continued to coat and rub small fibreboard panels of the same size, 50 centimeters by 45 centimeters. "It was like I was obsessed, I kept going back. I manipulated the material so I could meet the genie that could come out."
Since that winter in the late 1990s, about 30 silhouettes have appeared. "Nobody knew. It came out of the darkness, out of my darkness; I kept it a secret." Each painting, neither signed nor titled or dated, is a piece of her universe. "A sense of ghost," as she described it. "I was always told there was mystery in me, and I appealed to it. Twenty-five years ago, something set me on this path and I have not deviated from it since. I did not become a painter; I am accompanied by painting."
Obsessive and confidential
The public can discover her "painted reliefs" in the Musée d'Art Moderne's basement in Paris, until September 10, 2023. They form part of a new exhibition in the permanent contemporary collection called Parallel Worlds. There was no red carpet for the 77-year-old actress, with her work buried among seven rather famous artists. All of them have followed an unusual and solitary trajectory, outside any artistic movement. Hélène Garache, 94, worked in the shadows all her life and is exhibiting her terracotta for the first time. Marie Bourget, who died in 2016, left a body of conceptual sculptural work largely owned by the Musée d'Art Moderne.
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