artist/ BLANCHARD
France
“By inverting the world, we apprehend all its beauty” In the dress of artisan, with her square eye, Sabine Blanchard sublimates the petty things of everyday life by organizing them in a surprising formal way. Sewn, married or stacked, everything is brought to re-enchantement.
Sabine uplifts manufactured products to a unique visual celebration, bringing life to majestic brooms, golden screws, exotic teapots … The initial module is quickly forgotten. It blurs into a surprisingly constructed geometry. Like a meditative gesture, her work combines both the Yin of the final sketch, and the Yang of the engineered articulation.
Her studies in architecture and urban-planning trained her to juggle between infinitely large and infinitely small. The anachronistic blending of industrial products and ancestral artefacts delivers a message of timelessness, as if art had frozen them “forever” in a playful pantheon. The artist, who calls herself an activist of the “beautiful-modest”, invites the art-loving observer in her poetic gaze, often humorous and almost “childish”, in the sacred sense of the term. She also takes care to carry out a handover ritual, as if she charges it with good vibrations and baptizes it towards a new destiny. Her 3D works either hang like a bird on a wire, sit in a case like a jewel or transfigure itself.
Sabine Blanchard is French but she claims her Belgian roots and their sense of humor she subtly cultivates. She worked as an urban planner in a Parisian agency. She then moved to Switzerland for 10 years of architectural achievements and several novels and essays.
In 2012, she settled in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. A decisive and transformative experience. Through her monthly drawings in Madame Magazine, her characters enchanted the expatriate community and she then published her first illustrative work “Diary of a Parisian in Dubai” (2017).
In return, Dubai, well known for its superlatives, decided to initiate her to a subtle firework of the Middle East and Indian subcontinent cultures. Inspired by Indian markets, street sellers of cables, ropes, cages … she leaped forward and created her first abstract associations. Her work had been rapidly noticed and she had a solo exhibition at La Galerie Nationale, in Arserkal Avenue, the vibrant community dedicated to Contemporary Art.. Her “workarounds” also apply to urban photography. The graphic deconstruction of a site, a city, a crowd, allows it to be read, at different allegorical levels.
Sabine Blanchard has been invited to Design Days, was awarded by the Alliance Française (2018), Art Dubai (2019)…. The Ambassador of France hosted her work in a VIP exhibition at his Residence in Abu Dhabi. Her art pieces are now enjoyed by private connoisseurs in Paris, Dubai, Brussels, Beyrouth and also in Italy, United States, South Africa….
Passionate about ethnology – which is at the core of her approach as a visual artist – she published a second book and first novel “And divine, I became (among the Papuans)” (Verona Edition). For Sabine, writing is entirely part of a creative “EVERYTHING” and her Northern star remains poetry, dreams and a certain transcendence of everyday life.
Sabine Blanchard has also work with the French Pavilion of Dubai World Expo 2020: she designed a Flower Jungle to showcase the French Art de vivre and she revisited the stylish tableware of the prestigious brands Bernardaud, Baccarat, Lalique and Christofle.
