Camille Bernard: Nest

With Corentin Darré, Simon Lahure and l’3cole.

Curators: The CAC Brétigny team

While Brown Hair gradually blends into the landscape and becomes stone, Bright Hair continues to twirl one of their long blonde curls between their fingers absentmindedly. A cabin rises softly around the two bodies, entangling them. It’s not clear if they are inside the cabin, or if they are the cabin. Branches and strands knot tentatively, forming a floating network of bifurcations and loose, almost elusive lines. As if we would just have to pull a little, here on a branch, there on the end of a strand, for everything to slip. For everything to come undone. The cabin seems to anticipate its own demise by refusing to be completed. Despite its fragile appearance, the structure holds together, albeit awkwardly. As if from the outset, it wasn’t so much a question of duration but of languor and delicacy, of a gentle melancholy that the surrounding landscape welcomes willingly. In its miraculous technicity, the slender scaffolding invites other possible constructions.

Invited to CAC Brétigny by the art centre’s team [1], the young Franco-Scottish painter Camille Bernard presents the series Nest, a new group of paintings after which the exhibition is also named. To make a nest is to imagine ways of living and doing in a constantly changing world. It is to inhabit a place, rather than furnish it; to favour discrete and patient, serendipitously painstaking undertakings, over virile uses of space and time. Building nests, not to withdraw from the world, but to face it. The best shelters are those we can leave at any time, those that allow refusal and the desire for change. The characters in Camille Bernard’s paintings know this, they are looking to reinvent rather than shelter themselves. And reinvention is not something undertaken alone. It happens through friendship, through the group. Whether it be within the languid busyness, through the raising of a cupola of branches or playing with water drops on the tip of the tongue; or in inaction, in the form of this trio absorbed in their thoughts beneath undulations of flowers and lianas vines, the artist’s canvases radiate a suave and quivering tranquillity. The characters are one with each other, nestled in a nature that embraces both their activity and their boredom. It is a place where we meet, are active, but also a place where get lost in our thoughts and doze off. We do things without necessarily knowing what, for the pleasure of doing it. A bit like playing truant, when we push back a school’s walls and choose to make our own.

So l’3cole comes to write itself there, in the summer light that warms the floor of the art centre, inviting everyone to weave their desires for knowledge and transmission. True research in action, l’3cole is a space for discussion and experimentation, to reflect together on the uses of an alternative school for amateur practices and knowledge within the visual arts. Initiated in October 2020 at CAC Brétigny, and meeting once a month, depending on the Covid-19 restrictions, l’3cole has brought together people from diverse walks of life [2] who all share a common desire to learn and do things differently. The dreamy communities of Camille Bernard are joined then by those of l’3cole, a nebulous group of which the composition varies according to the season, the desire and the availability of each person. It is a group that will continue to transform and develop during the exhibition according to meetings and comings and goings. To host this, Camille Bernard, with the help of the artists Corentin Darré and Simon Lahure, has made a piece of furniture, a child out of stones and brambles, lifted straight out of her paintings. This is where l’3cole’s activities, conversations and reveries will take place. Large stones and a few branches from which we can take turns to design nests, try out hair cabins, become a rock and metamorphose. Dreamlike mirrors of what is slowly being tried out within l’3cole, Camille Bernard’s inhabited universes encourage grouping and the enthusiastic and fumbling agitation of those who refuse to accept imposed roles and identities.

Notes
[1] The exhibition is, in fact, curated collectively, involving all job positions at the art centre (management, public outreach, production, communication, technicians), from full-time employees to interns.

[2] Have participated to one or several session(s) of l’3cole: Mamadou Balde, Juliette Beau Denès, Camille Bernard, Laura Burucoa, Morgane Brien-Hamdane, Margaux Carvalho, Jérôme Colin, Mathis Collins, Thomas Conchou, Etienne De France, Camille Duval, Milène Denécheau, Domitille Guilé, Ariane Guyon, Céline Drouin Laroche, Victorine Grataloup, Loïc Hornecker, Elisa Klein, Daisy F. Lambert, Louise Ledour, Juliette Lefebvre, Elena Lespes Muñoz, Fanny Lallart, Vinciane Mandrin, Camille Martin, Lou Masduraud, Anne-Charlotte Michaut, Marie-Françoise Millon, Céline Millot, Mathilde Moreau, Zoé Philibert, Mélanie Pobiedonoscew, Céline Poulin, Marie Preston, Dina Ravalitera, Sebastien Remy, Sophie Rogg, Katia Schneller, Emilie Tournellec, Valentina Ulisse, Juliette Valenti, Nathalie Valenti et Gaël Vince.

Press file available here.

Camille Bernard (1994, Paris) is a Franco-Scottish artist. After a portfolio preparation course in the small port town of Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands, she more intimately discovered figurative painting and large formats, which led her to enrol in the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) in 2012. There her work becomes multidisciplinary, and moves between painting on canvas, video and set design. In 2014, she went to study at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague as part of an Erasmus exchange programme and, that same year, took part in the group exhibition Novembre à Vitry at the Galerie municipale Jean-Collet in Vitry-sur-Seine. Graduating from the GSA in 2016, she was selected to participate in the “New Contemporaries” exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh in 2017. She was awarded the Fleming-Wyfold prize and bursary. Since then, her work has been included in several group exhibitions, such as “New Scottish Artists” presented for the first time by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation at the David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF, London, 2017), and later at The Cello Factory (London, 2018). In 2020, at the invitation of SISSI Club and in partnership with the collective Arcade Majeure, she took part in an exhibition at the open day of the Couvent de la Cômerie in Marseille entitled “Poeurnf”. She continues to collaborate with SISSI Club, notably for the “SuperSalon” at the Paris Internationale in 2020. Together, they received a grant from the CNAP to put on the exhibition “Bruisse l’eau” with Simon Lahure at SISSI Club and take part in the Printemps de l’Art Contemporain in Marseille. After a period of living in Brussels and Paris, she now lives in Uzerche in Corrèze where she works in a collective studio. Camille Bernard is represented by SISSI Club (Marseille).

Corentin Darré is an artist and graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC). His work focuses on our relationship with the digital, the changes it engenders and the new fractures it creates. Installation, sculpture, video and computer-generated images are blended into sensitive, fictional narratives. The contemporary mythologies he refers to question the “self”, its relationships with love, sexuality and violence. Presentations of his work include a solo exhibition at the Galerie du Crous in 2021 and group exhibitions at Monastère Des Clarisses (2021, Roubaix), Confort Mental (2021, Paris), Biquini Wax EPS (2021, Mexico City), Galerie YGREC (2019, Paris), Confort Moderne (2018, Poitiers) Centre de la photographie Genève (2016, Switzerland) and at l’Espace Khiasma (2016, Les Lilas). He lives and works in Paris.

Simon Lahure, born in 1993, is a multidisciplinary artist. After spending his childhood in Rouen, and teenage years on the island of Réunion, he returned to metropolitan France to pursue his art studies. In 2019, he graduated with a master’s degree in illustration from the HEAR (Strasbourg). His aesthetic choices are influenced by the sensations of adolescence, nature, folklore and extreme sports. Stemming from drawing, and at the service of an evasive narration, his art manifests itself as much in the making and printing of imagery as in installation, scenography, costume making, music and sound design. Matured in an independent and collective culture, his practice takes place within various creative groups including Exposissimo (artist collective), Maison Vertigo (textile creation workshop co-founded in 2020 with Paul Descamps and Vera Fatale), the Amicale du Freesquet (free party collective co-founded with Gabriel Audetat and Paul Descamps). He has been involved in the organization of the micro-edition fair Spin off since 2017, and in the artist-run space Cyberrance in Romainville, where his workshop is situated. He has presented his work in various group shows including “Exposition d’urgence” co-curated in Ourcq Blanc (Paris, 2019), “Poeurnf” at the Couvent de la Cômerie (Marseille, 2020) “Bruisse l’eau”, in collaboration with Camille Bernard, at SISSI Club (Marseille, 2021), “Exposissimo 1” at L’Oasis (Uzerche, 2021), “J’espère qu’on sera assis à côté dans le train” (Dragono, 2021), “Exposissimo 2” at Spin off (Angoulême, 2022).

The 3cole project is part of the “Contrat d’Éducation Artistique et Culturelle” (CTEAC) of Coeur d’Essonne Agglomération with the DRAC Île-de-France and the Academy of Versailles. L’3cole is conducted in partnership with commizariat. The CAC Brétigny is a cultural establishment of Cœur d´Essonne Agglomeration. Labeled as a Contemporary Art Center of National Interest, it benefits from the support of the Ministère de la Culture—DRAC Île-de-France, Région Île-de-France and Conseil départemental de l’Essonne, and with the complicity of the Brétigny-sur-Orge’s municipality. CAC Brétigny is a member of TRAM and d.c.a