CAROLINE VICQUENAULT
“Les thèmes abordés par Caroline Vicquenault sont extrêmement divers. L’artiste passe aussi aisément des portraits de ses proches ou de ses chiens, qu’à des vues d’une mer démontée ou des pics enneigés. à cette diversité thématique, s’ajoutent un style et une facture qui diffèrent très fortement en fonction des sujets traités, ou selon les exigences qu’impose le dialogue entre l’artiste et son œuvre. Quelquefois, alors que la toile pourrait donner le sentiment qu’elle est terminée, Vicquenault lâche brutalement un jet de couleur, à la manière de Francis Bacon, qui dérègle le sens et l’harmonie initiale du tableau. Derrière la virtuosité technique de l’artiste et la variété des sujets qu’elle traite, plane un arrière monde fantastique, qui fascine par son énigmatique présence. Une exposition de Caroline Vicquenault constitue toujours un événement rare.”
Gilles Altieri, commissaire de l’exposition solo de Caroline à la Maison du Cygne, Six-four, 2026
Whether she is portraying human beings or animals, Caroline Vicquenault gives her models the same fraternal gaze and the same empathy, to the point that it is difficult not to use the term "face" in the case of the latter.
In his way of treating his subjects, the artist does not use a systematic process and moves with the same ease from a relatively classical approach with painting in flat tints and shapes with clear cuts, to a touch
sensitive and free which highlights the hand of the artist at work, with its hesitations, its visible second thoughts, which can go as far as extreme gestural violence as we see in the pieces where Caroline Vicquenault masks and
buries faces under a sheet of impetuously thrown paint. Nevertheless, one has the feeling that in all cases the painter's hand remains under his control and does not overflow his intention, so much so that even his most vehement pieces present a certain finished aspect quite common among many figurative artists today, without it seeming necessary for these painters to go through the desperate stage of chaos and catastrophe.
But Caroline Vicquenault's impressive technical mastery is not an end in itself that would place her in a conventional comfort; it is in reality accompanied by a permanent questioning of the painter on the specificity of painting, its corporality and its language, on the relationships that this medium establishes with the viewer and his own gaze.
This research is the subject of experiments and new learning, both in her way of painting and in the themes she addresses, some of which are complex compositions that bring together apparently heterogeneous elements to offer mysterious visions whose meaning escapes us.
There is no doubt that the coming years will prove to be exciting for Caroline Vicquenault's work.
Gilles Altieri