Elevation, 2025

Christine Gouez-Manhes  

Born in Brest in 1975 and currently based in Toulouse, Christine Gouez-Manhes draws the foundations of her artistic identity from the landscapes of her Breton childhood. Very early fascinated by rock and the mineral world, she searches for forms and presences that will gradually come to the heart of her practice.

In parallel with a twenty-five-year international career in business, in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, she pursues her artistic work without interruption. Notably trained at the Beaux-Arts Workshops of the City of Paris, she explores trompe-l'œil, portraiture, and develops a series dedicated to the shells of fishermen, in homage to the workers of Finistère.

In 2024, she chooses to dedicate herself fully to her art. Her painting then gradually evolves from figuration towards a more abstract and gestural expression, while rock establishes itself as her favorite subject.

.Her approach resonates notably with the physical and material approach of Antoni Tàpies, the gestural power of Franz Kline, the search around black and light of Pierre Soulages, as well as with the silent spaces and horizons of Geneviève Asse.

Starting in 2025, she also enriches her practice with drypoint etching, exploring drypoint, etching, and aquatint. This new discipline feeds back into her painting and strengthens her work around black, depth, and contrasts.

Christine Gouez-Manhes regularly exhibits her work. She participates notably in the Autumn Salon of Paris and the Salon des Artistes Français – Art Capital at the Grand Palais, as well as in various exhibitions and artistic events in the Toulouse region and in France.

Deeply attached to art as a means of sharing and creating connections, she also develops artistic initiatives auprès of different audiences and in the business world.

Through rocks and mineral forms, explored at the border between figuration and abstraction, Christine Gouez-Manhes creates a meeting point between the "matter of the world" and the "matter of self". Through painting and drypoint etching, she explores geological time and inscribes human existence in a larger temporality.

In her painting, she allows the inks and acrylics to mark the surface organically. Through superimpositions, impasto, scratched areas, and successive overpainting, her work acquires a deeply tactile dimension. The resulting matter creates a sensation of density: it evokes what resists, what remains in the face of time.

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Alongside the rocks, the artist unleashes her gesture, oscillating between calligraphic traces and paint projections to express what traverses her. Her canvases thus become places of memory, both intimate and geological. Facing the rock, our own inner upheavals, like the most violent external forces, are inscribed in a larger continuum.

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Her drypoint etching practice responds to this same philosophy. Developed over a prolonged process, the copper plate is worked with drypoint then bitten by acid. Each mark—whether the result of chance or intention, of a delicate gesture or a more aggressive intervention—is transferred onto the paper. It is the intensity of the acid bite that gives the ink its depth.

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Rocks, fractures, and stones come to life in a palette dominated by blacks, grays, and deep flashes of blue. The magma transforms, forms emerge, and their poetry begins to resonate, accompanied by the writings of Guillevic and the music of Yann Tiersen, which nourish her creative process.

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The association of figurative mineral landscapes with powerful, material, and gestural abstraction characterizes her work. It brings us back to the very essence of our human condition: ephemeral in the face of the permanence of stones, yet vibrant and deeply rooted in the matter of the world.

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For Christine Gouez-Manhes, painting is a journey through matter. Under her brush and her knife, the gesture seeks less to describe the world than to reveal its underlying structures: strata, tensions, and erasures. The canvas becomes a living territory, a space where rocks emerge and where color is lived physically.

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It is a true tactile choreography: the brush caresses or insists, while the knife cuts, displaces, and reveals. The materials respond to each other: the inks penetrate the surface, the acrylic seizes the intensity of the moment, while the oil retains memory. Working in successive layers and sedimentation, she welcomes the accident as an ally, gradually constructing the surface until the work reaches its point of balance, on the threshold between emergence and resistance.

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Etching establishes a more intimate dialogue, inscribed in metal. On the copper plate, the drypoint incises the surface, the etching opens its paths, and the aquatint builds the volumes. The acid bites the metal and carves grooves into it, in the way that erosion marks rock or in the way that human presence leaves its trace. Each incision becomes a memory.

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Then comes the passing through the press. This reveals what was hidden and transfers the imprint onto the paper. Between mastery and abandon, Christine Gouez-Manhes welcomes the unpredictability of the acid baths, the depth of the blacks, and the density of the materials.

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The print thus becomes an imprint.