AT THE BEGINNING

« Light » is the key word that guided this new session. Always looking for diversity, there are no rules at Artist, we dare to make certain ruptures. The desire wandered towards a less figurative, more minimalist spirit. The prerequisite for this back-to-school collection was structured around well-defined stylistic axes: few colors, strong tones, energy, oppositions, contrasts. Work on the sensory, the touches, the reliefs, even more softness. The work of Catherine Cazau, painter, engraver, author, visual artist, was the perfect answer.

 Having left for the Drôme to open the door of his workshop, François and Brigitte took all the time to meet them, even more so to get to know each other faced with the artist's questions regarding the unexpected request for a wearable art line!

This long moment of knowledge - and connivance in the end - led to an unexpected retrospective of all of his pictorial work. Discover a real language, a writing that materializes through signs, imprints, entanglements; a whole full creation of poetry. 

 

Artist cracked on three elements from the same series of 10 pieces on beautiful Rives paper, produced during confinement. When Catherine Cazau declares his love of the trace, Artist endorses and baptizes its theme “ Originally ».

This rapprochement leads to confidence. We now know that fashion attracts him, to the point of wishing that fashion design be perceived as an art in the same way as sculpture or architecture. Fabrics and their patterns also influence it. And for the record, it is most often in pants that she prefers, but the skirt accompanies her in summer.

 

His technique :

“It was not me who decided to paint, drawing and painting imposed themselves on me from a very young age: I see myself, at nine years old, in class, drawing little girls' faces on my pink blotters comic book style.” Catherine Cazau remember. And childhood will remain a field of predilection for a long time: 32 years old part-time teacher and full-time artist! Learning to write, sharing signs and other graffiti that amaze you, transmitting what is inside you.

“I carry out two types of work in parallel or almost. They respond to each other and are necessary to me.

I express myself on the one hand on paper where I mix engraving, painting, signs and collages divers ; and I paint elsewhere on canvas with a very present texture where different symbols and assemblages mingle, or else it is prints which constitute the essential part of my work” explains the painter.

On the one hand, there is the importance of the text, the word, the letter. Loops like a staff of music, soft chatter to tell painted stories, voids and fullness. 

The text is not necessarily there to be read, often illegible to the eye of the viewer. He questions, surprises, and gives poetic, aesthetic ideas...

On the other hand, a very minimalist and abstract painting, often monochrome; materialistic canvases with a thick structure, with multiple layers, based on marble powder or other material…

Catherine C. loves black, gray and white. Nevertheless, color, yellow, and red in particular are present.

Also, for her creation, she draws inspiration from her own photos of traces of Nature which challenge and inspire her since almost the “origin” of her artistic journey.

 

Her approach:

“My work is definitely abstract. Some will see bodies, the sea, a desert, the mountain, or earthworms! I need to see nothing there!

I use various textures, very tactile thicknesses, to express the subtle, the inexpressible, the invisible.

I never know in advance where the white support will take me. I experiment every time. I like this risk-taking. The material, the gesture create successive layers. There are transformations, imperfections. The result, which one might think clumsy, interests me, it delivers something else. This materiality refers to spirituality, to reflection, to a meditative dimension in which everyone connects with their own inner wealth. My paintings are spaces of poetry, spaces of the interior. My works thus become silent mineral expanses, or talkative walls covered with prints. 

My hand claws, incises, cuts, scars the canvas. I write texts hastily, I cross out, I inscribe insignificant signs, I show the slow disappearance of what is erased, I engrave presence and absence at the same time, perhaps just for their absolute plastic beauty? ".

« At the origin » : the words to say it of Catherine Cazau and Artist.

Catherine Cazau was born in Drôme where she still lives and works.

1992 - 1994: School of Fine Arts / Valencia * 1990 - 2005: ERBA engraving workshop / Valencia.

Facebook : catherine.cazau - Instagram : catherinecazau www.studiosparis.wordpress.com- www.cazau.org – www.signes-et-matières.com