CAROLINE VICQUENAULT
I don't paint a picture of pure resistance, nor of pathos. I construct a poetry from shock, loss, and tumult.
but also from softer things, familiar landscapes, my animals, the things I love, the things that
I observe.
What I propose in my paintings is not a direct response, but a return to the world through art, an attempt to
to give form – and therefore meaning – to what is dislocated.
It is not a painting that reassures. It is a painting that says "This is what I saw", "This is what I felt". A painting
which asks the question of how to hold on, how to love, how to weather the storm. And which answers, in its own way, without
ready-made answer, but with poetry.
A poetry of recovery
Art becomes an act of resilience: a poetic and meditative space, both intimate and universal.
Title taken from the text by Jean-Marc Réol. See here
Storm Fisher , 2025
80x100cm, oil on canvas
Each canvas is a blind voyage, an inner exploration whose destination and revelations I am unaware of. These landscapes taking shape are like mental maps, laden with deeply personal symbols. We encounter echoes of memories, places explored, and boats that have marked my journey.
There are tributes, conscious or not, and a symbolism that I often decipher after the fact.
For me it's a bit like presenting three mountains: the past that creeps in, the present of creation, and the future of understanding.
From distance comes height , 2025
75x100cm, oil on canvas
Height is neither domination nor overhang, but a state of balance achieved by taking a step back.
Eagles are not threatening, but peaceful. They embody an inner movement: one that pushes one to temporarily escape the immediate to find a form of accuracy and coherence.
In this painting, I explore the notion of stepping back as a condition for a clearer and more peaceful vision.
Two eagles, hanging
in a vast sky, embody a form of instinctive lucidity, of clairvoyance.
Here, distance is not an escape, but a space of one's own, conducive to understanding.
The work invites us to rise differently: not above, but within.
The Moult , 2025
120x120cm, oil on canvas
At first, this canvas was destined to be the most frontal eroticism: a scene between two women, almost pornographic, designed to trigger desire and provocation (moreover, I found my models in a pornographic film on the internet). However, over the layers of paint and the hours spent in front of the canvas, something else emerged: the deep and
complex to represent women… when you are a woman yourself.
Why this shift? Painting eroticism means putting oneself under the fire of one's own expectations, one's desires—but also one's wounds and internalized models. Each brushstroke brings us back to the question , "What do I really want to show, and why?"
.
During the work my desire was to convey a more intimate and more accurate message, and the painting shifted towards the scene you see today, a call for transformation rather than seduction. This gesture revealed me to myself: to represent a woman is to carry a double burden - that of external looks and that of self-judgment -. I had to decide that my subject was no longer pornography but the road to the light. This canvas is therefore a ritual of molting, an unfinished confession and an act of liberation.
It demonstrates what painting can be when we agree to let the image transform us, rather than bending it to our initial desires.
To hit rock bottom 2025, 420x200cm, oil on canvas
(For scale)
Like Jonah* in the belly of the great fish, we don't know if we are being swallowed or gathered. If it is an end or a passage. We enter the darkness of a matter that envelops us. Soon the light no longer comes from above, but from a deep, almost inaudible interior. It is there that the most intimate truths emerge.
It is in the silence of our depths that the most universal truths resonate.
*The Book of Jonah, Old Testament, Passage through the belly of the fish: mainly chapter 2, verses 1 to 11 (or 2:1 to 2:10 depending on the edition)
Biarritz, 2025
240x150cm, oil on canvas
After the storm, the light. The waves roar, the winds rise, but in the distance... A rainbow splits the clouds. The sea is moving, the sky opens, the lighthouse keeps watch. A character walks with his dog on the beach... He doesn't seem worried.
It's beautiful outside, 2024
80x60cm, oil on canvas
This is from my bedroom at my parents' house. The view facing my mirror allows me to see my dogs and me, on my bed. I love this view. I don't want to move anyway to go enjoy the outdoors. I would have preferred it to rain so as not to feel guilty. But I don't feel like getting out of bed. It's there, with my dogs, that I feel good. I just lost my father.
There are birds singing outside. I tell myself they are angels.
Silence and Memory, 2024
50x60cm, oil on canvas
The painting is bathed in a heavy, thick silence. Not an empty silence, but an inhabited silence. That of contained love, of words left unsaid, of a presence that transforms. I paint what remains when we no longer know what to do.
This painting is a farewell without a howl, a tribute to the one who was, to the one who passed on. It is an image of love, of lineage, of loss—but also of presence.
FRACAS , 2024
120x120cm, oil on canvas
In front of us, a wave crashes against a rocky jetty. It's a confrontation without outcome: that of the living being striking against that which won't yield.
A few tiny shells among the stones: a fragile, almost invisible, yet essential presence. They are love in chaos. The gentleness that resists. The child who remains standing.
My Shining Light, 2024
80x100cm, oil on canvas
Initial work 2021, reworked in 2024.
This painting had been sleeping in my studio for several years.
But a few years later , I reworked the vines in the foreground: they evoke my arrival in Burgundy .
Those in the background, above, recall the history of the great grape varieties.
The luminous arc, borrowed from the title of a song by Aime Simone, traces a path towards the love encountered, and what remains to be discovered.
The arc becomes a bridge: between past and future, between what I was and what I am striving towards. This work is both archive and omen: Born from a first impulse, transfigured by a second life, to embody today the light found again, and the promise of all that remains to be gathered .
Winter landscape, 2023
100x150cm, oil on canvas
This painting is a journey between worlds. At first glance, it appears to be a mountain landscape bathed in a supernatural light, but upon closer inspection, it is much more than a simple representation of nature: it is a vision.
The sun, almost too perfect, ringed by halos and suspended in an iridescent sky, evokes a higher consciousness, a cosmic eye, a source of primordial energy. It does not heat; it illuminates the soul.
There is this contrast between the atmospheric softness of the sky and the earthly roughness of the ground. It is as if the connection between the celestial and the carnal is painted. Between thought and body. Between the beyond and this world.
In the Verdon, 2023
160x200cm, oil on canvas
In this painting, there is a man, alone, in the water. Facing him: the forest, moving, alive, almost unreal. I wanted an encounter. Something between mystery, contemplation, and vital impulse. The paint flows, breathes, sometimes surpasses me.
Like nature.
Balance , 2023
260x180cm, oil on canvas
Un jour, sur une crique du Cap Ferrat, j’ai vu un homme empiler des cailloux sur un rocher, à la toute extrémité de la côte. Il était là, immobile, concentré. Tout autour de lui bougeait -la mer, le vent, la lumière, sauf lui. Il cherchait la stabilité dans
l’instable, l’équilibre sur des surfaces rugueuses. Ce qu’il faisait était à la fois dérisoire et profondément beau.
Avant de peindre cette scène, j’ai décidé d’arrêter le métier de peintre décoratrice que j’exerçais depuis 2 ans environ. Cette toile marque un tournant: celui où j’ai retrouvé, dans la peinture, ce que j’avais perdu dans les chantiers- la joie, la surprise, la liberté.
She tells of an inner upheaval, a reconquest