Charlotte Vitaioli
Charlotte Vitaioli is a multidisciplinary artist born in 1986 and based in Rennes. A graduate of the Beaux-arts in Quimper, the artist expresses herself in a wide variety of media, from gouache to performance, with references to Pop Art or the Japanese prints of Henri Rivière. Her paintings play with close-ups: an eye on an umbrella, a face on a fan, the artist works on an obsession, an almost fetishistic narrative. Whether a song or a love film, Charlotte Vitaioli’s paintings are as much about the music of feelings as they are about the illusion of the silver screen.
In 2021, she won a prize at the Salon de Montrouge in Paris, a show that has launched a number of contemporary art stars. Her first solo show, “Une Coline au Soleil”, opened in November 2021 at Galerie Ars Longa, and she won the Prix Novembre in Vitry-sur-Seine the same year. Her EP “La Noyée” is released in 2023 in correlation with her exhibition at the BF15, Centre d’art contemporain in Lyon. She is also a finalist for the Prix Art Norac 2023 at FRAC Bretagne and currently works at Volonté 93. From June to September 2024, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition organized by Philippe Puiguet at the Chapelle de Thonon, Le jardin des promesses confuses. Galerie Ars Longa also welcomed her and fellow artist Joachim Monvoisin for the exhibition Match avec Marcel in December 2023.
Art critic Henri Guette wrote of her :
All it takes is one expression, one trigger word. La belle vie. Story of a love. And the lyrics of a song are added to the discussion. It’s as simple as in Alain Resnais’s film “On connaît la chanson”, where certain lines are taken directly from the popular repertoire. Charlotte Vitaioli likes to say that she paints love pictures like love songs. She has a facility for humming, and offers images that are easily imprinted and persist like refrains. A member of the musical duo Club Vérité, which she founded with Soline Chailloux, she invests costumes as much as the set as a potential site for painting. Painting stage curtains in the colors of sunsets, or even sunrises, she claims to occupy this place of passage. Playing with simulacra and unafraid to show the backstage, Charlotte Vitaioli asserts that there is a poetry to be grasped in illusion, whatever the spectacular tradition to which one refers. In the spaces she recreates in exhibition halls, the artist shows a world more open than we might think. In the porosities she explores, notably in her installation-performance project Le ballet tribalesque, there are those of the Japanese art of kabuki and the teachings of Oskar Schlemmer, a dance teacher at the Bauhaus. More broadly, there are references to pop art and to the Japanese prints of Henri Rivière in these paintings, in which clear lines are emphasized.
Charlotte Vitaioli paints quickly, with large, energetic gestures that seize the moment. There’s something sensual about her bold colors on paper. The treatment of the surface recalls the movement of the water she loves to represent, the play of waves and ocean foam. Her seaside landscapes express both joy and melancholy. A man and a woman. The Green Ray. The young women she portrays look like icons of the New Wave. We might think of Anna Karina or Brigitte Bardot, but the reference to Jacques Demy’s Deneuve and Dorléac twins is the most obvious. Through the very form of the paintings, which play with close-ups: an eye on an umbrella, a face on a fan, the artist works on an obsession, an almost fetishistic narration. A song or a love film, Charlotte Vitaioli’s paintings are as much about the music of feelings as they are about the illusion of the silver screen.
Médias :
Date:
7 November 2023