artist/ PICHAUD

FRANCE

A multi-talented, self-taught artist, Claire Pichaud has forged her artistic personality through encounters.

She began her pictorial career at the age of 35. It’s a journey punctuated by periods of work in series, expressed mainly in oils on paper and acrylics on canvas.
Typical of the first period are muted colors in which ochres, browns and grays, applied with light touches, harmoniously interact. The first oils on paper, in an abstract or figurative style.
In 1971, the artist turned to abstraction. Geometry constructs space (Window series).

Throughout the 1980s, Claire Pichaud produced a series of paintings executed in Roulor. Geometry gives way to randomness, and color takes center stage.
The “Bandes verticales” series: large, loose canvases, stretched or unstretched, bleached, coated and crumpled, painted on the ground in an explosion of color, echoing certain experiments by artists in the support-surface group.

The pictorial gesture is then reworked, still using Roulor. The artist opts for all-over painting. The spaces and whites of the early ’80s are filled with a certain density on a crumpled canvas. This “Epreintes aléatoires” series led, at the very end of the 80s, to the “Forêt profonde” series (1989-1990).1990 -1991 saw the emergence of a new series: Les suites saturniennes. Following a series of bereavements in her immediate environment, the artist expresses herself through a darker style of painting. Black takes on a more prominent role. Some forty canvases were produced, imbued with the symbolism of time and metaphors of life.

The “Astrological Signs” series brings Claire Michaud’s pictorial career to a close, as she returns to poetry, inscribing poems in squares or tondi.

Claire Pichaud’s work has been exhibited, commissioned and acquired by the Fonds national d’Art contemporain (two signs of the zodiac), the Manufacture des Gobelins (two works for national furniture), the
Frac de Mont de Marsan…).