Camille Girard
& Paul Brunet

30.11.2020
Texte publié dans le catalogue de l'exposition Je suis devenu une chaise, un une amie, un pied, le nez, le pot et un chien.
Joëlle Bacchetta, 2018

Camille Girard and Paul Brunet graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Quimper in 2008. Since then, they have joint both their personal artistic practices together in a single output, co-creating and co-signing their works as one. Although their work can be summed up as drawing, they also use draughtsmanship as a vehicle for a wider range of possibilities and forms, such as installations, three-dimensional pieces, and performance art.
“(…) Camille Girard and Paul Brunet give a four-handed depiction of the world through an assiduous practice of drawing. Like the greatest mangaka, their drawing pays attention to the most simple or trivial elements in our surroundings – a cat staring at you, a collection of toys, a garden in the snow. They are equally as attentive to what fuels our vision – the books that we read, works that we take in, or films that we have seen or have yet to see. In other words, a cultural landscape that resembles those who give the night a voice and keep the day on alert; a poetics that relates otherworldliness and distance to whatever encourages proximity. And so, from their lookout at 24 rue Madame de Pompéry, Camille Girard and Paul Brunet speak to us of a world that unfolds right before their eyes, as well as of the worlds they dream of, in the simplest of ways – that is, by making the greatest complexity visible to us.” Bruno Peinado, 2012.

“(…) Camille and Paul have developed an art of observing things that could at first seem insignificant or mundane, but the light they shine on these things invites us to take a closer look. These snippets of life they show us, with the profusion of lines and the meticulousness and precision of hand-drawn reproduction, are caught in the fabric of time. The gentleness that emanates from their works is the antithesis of a virile and autocratic action – their art is a caring, attentive art. They have never ceased to tell us the story of life in common, of a utopia of friendship in every sense of the term: friends, cats, the cave-house, the garden, the sea – theirs is a shared world, a world we experience with them. Friendship is not a small club; friendship is a way of life…” Joëlle Bacchetta, 2018.