Sans titre 4, 2024

Barbara Christol  

Barbara Christol grew up in the artistic world and was passionate about dance, piano and visual arts from a young age. As a young adult, she put aside her scales and slippers to devote herself to her all-consuming passion: drawing. This is how she trained at the Beaux-Arts in Nîmes and subsequently attended several painters' workshops in her city in order to perfect her techniques. Eager to conduct her own visual and aesthetic research, she then joined the Sorbonne University in Paris and wrote a doctoral thesis on the “Transitional Labyrinth". Long defined as a “nomadic visual artist", having lived for several years between Paris and Santiago de Chile, Barbara Christol is now based in Nîmes. She regularly takes part in artistic residencies and national and international exhibitions. She also leads projects in collaboration with creators from other artistic fields, particularly in dance and music. Her works are part of numerous private collections in Europe, England and the United States.

Artistic approach

Barbara Christol sees creation as a labyrinth, in which the artist advances at the crossroads by trial and error, chance and repetition, while maintaining her guiding thread. Initially oscillating between the three-dimensional staging of a recurring object and photography, her taste for play and spatial arrangement quickly evolved towards a questioning of artistic creation seen as a rhizome, where the artist operates from "displacements", the central theme of her research. Barbara Christol's work thus stands out over the years by developing a nomadic plastic practice, adaptable to the conditions of the travels she undertakes alone in the world. This is how the artist creates series of ephemeral weavings from balls of wool - the same favorite material for 25 years - which she exhibits in nature, in institutional places, private spaces. In her paintings and drawings, the thread is always present either physically or through the omnipresent use of the line, and it is through plays of scale that she vacillates between figuration and abstraction. Very attached to the artisanal aspect of her work as an artist, she mainly uses classical and traditional techniques and materials that she reuses, mixes and declines with more contemporary techniques and tools. Barbara Christol tirelessly weaves and unweaves her work, halfway between Ariane and Penelope.