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LINE.C
LINE.C

Entering LINE.C’s world means traversing layers — layers of color and varnish, clay and pigment, but also layers of time, body and emotion. Since the very beginning, the artist from Rennes, born in 1977, has placed the face and the gesture at the heart of her research, seeking in the human being a territory where what escapes can emerge — the un...

Entering LINE.C’s world means traversing layers — layers of color and varnish, clay and pigment, but also layers of time, body and emotion. Since the very beginning, the artist from Rennes, born in 1977, has placed the face and the gesture at the heart of her research, seeking in the human being a territory where what escapes can emerge — the uncontrollable, the tremor, the crack in the mask.

Trained at the Rennes School of Fine Arts (1996–2000), she very early explored photography and video. Her “non-mask” series — bungee jumpers captured mid-air, then exposed onto canvas — reveals a fascination for those moments when expression bursts out raw, without filters. In parallel, she develops a pictorial practice on canvas nourished by dripping and by the gestural energy inherited from Pollock, but redirecting that aesthetic toward an interrogation of the face as a porous surface, a shifting mask, a projection space for the unconscious.

A formative journey to Africa led her to discover the power of natural pigments and the question of métissage. Her first androgynous faces, exhibited at Dak’Art 98 and then at Femin-Art in Germany and Belgium, already testified to a cosmopolitan universe attuned to dialogues between techniques and cultures. In 2004, the poster she created for the Transmusicales de Rennes inscribed her research in the public sphere and confirmed the aura of an artist able to let her visual vocabulary circulate between artistic and urban scenes.

But it was in 2008 that LINE.C took a decisive turn: the discovery of lacquer. She waited seven years before contacting master craftswoman Isabelle Emmerique, who would train her in European lacquer, a three-hundred-year-old tradition whose gestures draw from China and Japan. In this slow and demanding medium, the artist found the ideal place for a dialogue between technical rigor and inner vibration. Varnishes and pigments are laid down in successive layers, feeding each other, creating unprecedented depths where light seems to circulate from within the material itself.

This technical mastery is anything but a retreat. On the contrary, it opens LINE.C to an experience of extended time, where each layer becomes a breath, a meditative interval. This dimension deepened in 2018 during an artist residency in Longzhou, China. There she discovered calligraphy with master artists and learned to consider the line not as a mark but as a respiration. The notion of “breath,” essential to East Asian thought, now irrigates her gesture: the entire body participates in the act of painting, ink or pigment extending the inhalation and exhalation, the writing becoming almost choreography.

From this experience arose her “imaginary writings.” Neither alphabet nor calligraphy in the strict sense, they constitute a plastic language where the unconscious and emotion outweigh intention. The artist begins by transcribing her inner states, then frees herself from them to allow semi-abstract or figurative forms to appear, as if emerging from a mental hinterland.

In her recent works, the face remains but sometimes fragments, dissolving into the material only to reappear anew. Pigments, lacquers, oils and calligraphic gestures intertwine to build interior landscapes where the human is no longer just a subject but a texture, a rhythm, a flow. Abstraction and figuration do not oppose each other: they coexist, respond to each other, slide into one another like the layers of varnish she patiently superimposes.

Contemplating a work by LINE.C thus means accepting a double journey. A sensory journey first, into the thickness of the material: reliefs, inlays, transparencies that reveal themselves slowly. An inner journey next, into the space of emotions and archetypes: mixed faces, unknown writings, traces of breath. Her paintings and lacquers offer an experience of slowing down in a world saturated with instantaneous images; they invite us to take the time to observe, to enter the density of pigment and light, to listen to what the hand has inscribed in the silence of the gesture.

LINE.C’s work thus stands at the confluence of multiple heritages — Western gesturality and Eastern slowness, traditional techniques and contemporary questioning — to invent a profoundly singular pictorial language. She reminds us that beneath the layers of the mask there is always a breath, a writing, a face.

The Gallery’s Words: LINE.C


I discovered LINE.C’s work in 2018 and was immediately captivated. The delicacy, the lightness, the movement, and the energy were simply incredible. At the crossroads of eras, the artist guided me toward her spirituality and inner world. Seven years later, we are reconnecting, and to my great delight, we have agreed to present her work in Bordeaux—work that, I am convinced, will touch you deeply.

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LINE.C  There are 6 artworks

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Showing 1 - 6 of 6 items