Montagne, 2023

Cécile Girard  

hidden landscape

Cécile's art practices on paper

Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, nationalist consciousness was beginning to awaken in China in the field of art under the influence of modern Western industrial civilization. During this time, many artists left to study either in Europe or in Japan, the neighboring country which had already introduced European art there, with the intention of launching a reform in Chinese painting by absorbing the concepts as well as the forms of Western art, of which Xu Beihong and Lin Fengmian are prominent representatives. On the other hand, the painting of orthodox scholars (or literati painting) represented by Huang Binhong propelled the
modern transformation of Chinese painting into a conventional linguistic structure.

Their artistic practices in external expressive form and at the internal spiritual level, have offered us two effective means of fusing Chinese art with that in the West. As the historical process of reform and opening up since the 1970s has taken place, an increasing number of Western artists have come to China with their curiosity for Eastern culture.

They started in traditional Chinese painting by enriching it with Western concepts and techniques, they seem to have succeeded in transforming Chinese painting to another level.

The French artist Cécile Girard settled in China in the 90s, she began her journey of artistic exploration there for more than 20 years.

Cécile has adopted the typically Chinese taste for nature. In her creation, she focused on studying the brush, ink and materials of Chinese painting, and she tried hard to adorn it with Western analytical color, creating a unique artistic perspective.

In her first series named Landscapes I, Cécile tried to apply different strokes and colors in the representation of the natural landscape, she sketched the objects with the pretty calligraphic strokes of the brush to create the effect of “pictorial calligraphy” . We see, even, the strokes in the style of “epigraphic calligraphy-painting (金石书画)” and the strokes of paint are visible in some of his works. The maturity in his works demonstrates a strong inner expressiveness and strength filled with acrylic paint and the thick colors of oil paint.

In his latest series of Landscape Ⅲ, his use of brush and ink has reached extreme limits. Brush and ink calligraphy is presented on paper more freely, and the color of his paintings tends to be more simple and elegant. Brush, ink and colors are reflected, thus forming an image of Eastern Zen. Cécile's mode of creation in this phase is close to the paintings of Chinese scholars who express the inner spirit of the painters with the description of nature. Although the language has constantly changed since then, the basic structure of his paintings has remained the same.

Chinese rice paper becomes an essential material in the creation of Cécile.
As a Westerner, she has a rich imagination for the selection and use of materials.

Through special processing such as kneading, crimping and thickening rice paper, special texture and three-dimensional visual effect turn into part of the
paper itself.

This type of paper has a unique feature, that is, the folding of the paper would show the similar effect of crumpled aesthetics in Chinese landscape painting when ink is smeared on it. In his recent works, the practice of this creative method, that is to say that it rather softened brush strokes as much as it reinforced the formal representation to the functionality of the material, this became more and more more mature in its practices. In the background, we see simple lines vaguely drawn by the artist, which form a horizontal and vertical visual representation of the double landscape as well as the shading image formed by color on rice paper.

It breaks the limit of time and space in the picture, it is similar to the concepts of “distant in three modalities (三远)” in Song Dynasty landscape painting. The deep and mysterious chromatic expression and the artistic conception of the composition of the image testify to the artist's concern for the aesthetic subject, behind which lies the artist's broader vision of the world and his philosophy of life.

Cécile realized the deep meaning of this painting of Chinese scholars in her continuous practice and she integrated it perfectly into her own abstract language.
The artistic value of Chinese landscape painting goes far beyond painting techniques.
What is most important is the oriental literary spirituality hidden behind the painting techniques. Cécile's pictorial practices provided us with a sample that would allow us to discover the vast space and the possibility of the modern transformation of Chinese painting, which went beyond the artistic experience of Chinese painting itself.

Gu Jiajun
Deputy Director of the Duolun Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai