Catherine Saussine

Catherine Saussine was born in 1958.
She lives and works in Sanary-sur-Mer.

After a first life in Paris in education, Catherine moved to the south of France almost two decades ago. “I was looking, as usual, for new energies. These new vibrations will be creative: one rainy afternoon, as if to overcome boredom, instinctively she will grab the brushes. "I couldn't explain it any other way. I started painting, that's how it is. The gesture will be raw. The format, large. The techniques ? Definitely mixed. The support ? "Canvas, of course", which she prefers to paper: the texture of the paper does not forgive anything, because the paper marks everything" explains Catherine Saussine. “I like the surface of the canvas, it allows for accidents, the reserve of the brush is less controllable, the beautiful surprises arise there spontaneously. »

Experience of failure, whims of drips, learning to let go, long periods spent without touching his works – “I can stay for hours looking at a mass of shapes and colors on the canvas" –. Purely self-taught, alone in her studio, the artist will, without knowing it, go back to the sources of Art Brut. And, like many followers of the Art of the Fools* before her, find the key to the fields* , and let go of the internal dialogue, between her and her unconscious, with the canvas surface as the only medium.

“It all starts with the work on my backgrounds," comments the artist. “It is the emergence of funds that structures the future of pieces. They create the mass, designate the shadows, give the first unconscious elements for reading the future work. »

This first wall lamp posed, the artist will then shell a set of representations and graphemes: an eye here, a cry, a pair of claws, a hand, an embrace, a face there. A rich, abundant language, flanked by abstract swerves then emerges: “painting, as far as I'm concerned, is an experience of the unknown. It's an out-of-frame, off-screen outing, it's going where I don't know" explains Catherine. “Yes, go where you don't know , that's the leitmotif that I administer to myself before starting a painting.

A pocket manifesto that would obviously have pleased Jean Dubuffet, to which he would certainly have responded during his lifetime with his famous “that's precisely why we are curious to go and see**. »

In terms of influences, the painter could “also add Vas-y by Thomas Labarthe, as well as the miles and one exits from the road by Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work continues to amaze me as in the early days. Philosophy, that of Nietzsche and Spinoza, also accompanies me on a daily basis. »

Catherine Saussine has taken the key to the fields. Driven, instinctive fields, which summon to the table of a new naked feast, the strange and the raw.

Come get lost and marvel at it. Come where you don't know.