Christelle Franc

My activity is deployed in the books and the sets, pendants of these books, that I compose. With paper as my main material, I develop a certain language made up of words and figures.

In the books I draw various variations: I place photographs, photocopies of reproductions of works of art, extracts from literary texts, lists of words drawn up from definitions in the dictionary. I then rearrange the lists on panels with precise configurations, interlacing and fitting together multiple figures - taken from images pasted in the books.

This is my whole aim: to consider and bring together in a single thing what is fragment and chance. We don't get out of the sign. No more than language. It is a matter of situating oneself in language, of going through it, of making an inventive and active use of it.

Another living space responds to a temporality specific to the book, with the panels. In a continuous movement, I open small windows in the paper surface, letting words appear. These cutouts, screens of light in the superimposed layers of paper, animate the space with a rhythm - a beat - with, around, and through the figures.

Each set is an invitation to a gaze that is both contemplative and creative.