For French artist Fantine Reucha, drawing is an instinctive but essential act that allows her to convoke the simple purity of emotion so easily overlooked in the day-to-day. Her art is tender and dreamlike, its figures inscribed in a state of imminent lightness and peace. Fantine approaches creation as a poetic gesture, one guided by spontaneity and dedicated to the celebration of beauty and intimacy. Every line evokes the sincerity of a recovered memory, at once oneiric and timeless; in the space of a sigh, we lose ourselves to the tenderness of the eternal, the pause of a romantic escape. With each new piece, Fantine shares the gift of a nascent sentiment where the real relinquishes its grip, folds gently in upon itself, and finally gives way to a new way of seeing.
Fantine grew up in the blue of the Cévennes mountains, an influence now deeply present in her art. Her vision of the world is acutely sensitive, perhaps reflective of her origin in this space of calm and pensive seclusion. As a girl, she lost herself in the pages of books, a literary love affair which continues today. In her art as in her life, Fantine gives herself over to the exploration of boundaries between the real and the imaginary, paying special attention to the places where this frontier blurs and disintegrates. Since childhood, she has been filling notebooks with all the tiny incongruities that give her pause, a way of reflecting on the world that now goes hand in hand with her art. Undeniably, her relationship to language and her innate appreciation for the poetic are guiding threads in her work.
For ten years Fantine was nourished by the vibrant world of culture and art in Paris. But finally, at age 28, the call of nature guided her back to the intimacy and calm of the French countryside, ushering in a new chapter. Here she has found a return to her foundation, attaching immense importance to the communication of the profound simplicity of daily sensations, the pleasures that move her and accompany her from dusk to dawn. Her work is the tangible expression of these dreams and these questions, a space of rest but also of exploration.
Text by Kate Devine