Carlotta Bailly-Borg and Cécile Bouffard: Crazy Toads

Curator: Céline Poulin

Carlotta Bailly-Borg and Cécile Bouffard meet for the first time this winter in the art center. The invited artists share an amused pleasure of the pictorial matter and a desire for paint to overflow the frame becoming door, weapon or even organs. Belonging to the same generation of French artists (born in the 1980s and having studied in France), they also have an appetite for exchange and collaboration, juxtaposing their work with other disciplines such as architecture, dance or writing. One finds in their respective works incursions into forms of alternative rationalities, opposing that of modern thinking (the Cartesian thinking that dominates the 20th and 21st centuries), such as mysticism, spiritualism, or alternative medicine, as well as recurring references to the human body. Thus, bezoars, hermit frogs, copyist monks or intestinal knots will weave their way onto the walls of the art center. Their paintings, sculptures or bas-reliefs clinging to the space of the CAC will welcome the free artistic practices of l’Ǝcole.

Below is an excerpt from a conversation between the artists and the curator, which you can find in its entirety here.

Cécile Bouffard: I get interested in characters or kinds of behaviours, that I then inject into the pieces and into these scenes that are the exhibitions. The titles are also really important and contribute to this narrative dimension.

Carlotta Bailly-Borg: I recognise myself a bit in Cécile’s relationship with narration in the sense that it is present through branches, one story leads to another… You mentioned book peddlers, and at one point I became interested in the books they sold, notably the collection called the “blue library,” which was published in France in the 17th century. It was a DIY manual of its day. The books are like guides on all kinds of subjects: beauty, how to repair things… These texts were anonymous, the printers recycling and modifying the stories, and the book peddlers bringing them to the countryside. It didn’t feed into my work directly but rather into my fantasy about copying stories. I love the idea of anonymity too, the fact that we don’t know who added which bit of the story or when. This might have led to the copyist monk series.

Céline Poulin: You share an interest in marginal characters and in alternatives to the modern, rational, Cartesian way of thinking. This could express itself through the organic, making reference to mysticism or alternative forms of knowledge, like herbal medicine, witchcraft or even madness. I interpret this as sensitivity towards feminist knowledge, from the margins, which runs contrary to medical or scientific knowledge intensely connected to the patriarchy. What do you think ?

Cécile Bouffard: That’s really well said. For example, when I talk about “madness,” I’m referring to marginalised people, not to madness as defined by norms, the bourgeoisie, the State. I’m interested in madness as the sum of strange behaviours, which are transgressive and resistant, and not in its medical or psychoanalytical diagnosis.

Carlotta Bailly-Borg, born in 1984, lives and works in Brussels. She has been nominated for the 22nd Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize in 2021 and has exhibited among others at the Praz Delavallade Gallery in Paris and the Vitrine Gallery in Basel in 2022.

Cécile Bouffard, born in 1987, lives and works in Paris. She co-founded the artist-run-space Pauline Perplexe. She exhibited among others at Rond Point Projects, Marseille and at La Salle de Bains, Lyon in 2022. 

L’Ǝcole is a space for discussion and collective experimentation around practices and knowledge in the visual arts.

The CAC Brétigny is a cultural establishment of Cœur d’Essonne Agglomération. 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, with the complicity of the Brétigny-sur-Orge’s municipality. CAC Brétigny is a member of TRAM and d.c.a.