"Bonjour Monsieur Courbet " Painting

It’s in the former barn of the village bakery that Charlotte de Maupeou set up her workshop, like a secondary residence. There is a bed, a library and her work: notebooks, totems, engravings, softened canvas. A wealth of pictures, piled up and spread out. Notebooks constitute the genesis of the paintings, often layed out in series. They prepare the inner trip…it takes time for a series to materialize, to grip the body and give birth to veritable vertigo. When a series becomes familiar, Charlotte de Maupeou instinctively plunges into the receptive and deep canvas, seeking the flaw behind the orderly appearance of the portrayals. It’s a matter of urgency: the gesture is vivid, almost brutal. In the "Earth I" series, Charlotte de Maupeou works on simplicity of color, retaining only blue, black, white and subtle games of texture, opposing powdery and pigment, greasy pastel sticks and rough charcoal. To the contrary, in that of "Troubled waters", colors melt and twist into glints, like Ophelia. Great masters have nourrished other favorite themes of Charlotte de Maupeou, notably during her stay at Casa Velasquez, where she often played on the tradition of copying. Portraits like icons are stretched to near distortion. They query us in the manner of mirrors and appear like a gallery of characters. Charlotte de Maupeou pays tribute to the classics, tickling them in all due respect, while still seeking cracks in the posture. For her Spanish series, princess figures are drawn after Velasquez. She creates masks with faces of the „menines“, her little daughters wear them and she takes their pictures. Her Dutch series, where portraits by Frans Hals and Vermeer are reborn, is unabashedly revisited in a riot of colors as intense as they are delicate, in XXL close up. A lock of blond hair escaping from an indispensable beret, Charlotte de Maupeou glues, nails, tinkers about with pop dexterity, thanks to which fluorescent colors expand. She has fun and like a child, plays with representation. Her paintings bear the strength of defiance. Figures trapped in the gravity of ceremonial pomp reveal the fragility of their being. The artist paints on the ground and carries her paintings, caressed by large brush strokes, with both arms. Behind this unfurling energy and this spontaneity, there is also coherence and mastery, which together comprise the potency of works by Charlotte de Maupeou. Judith Helm