Charlotte Culot

“In my artist’s tool box there are gouaches that I make with pigments; paper; glue, and scissors. Working with gouache I find myself seduced by its density and opaqueness, its almost immediate luminosity. I construct my painting like architecture. Beneath the seemingly ordered forms there is a creative ‘chaos’: rough outlines and strokes cast ‘at random.’ Assembled they find their rightful place in a ‘cosmos.’ In trying to create a free space, structured, open and complete, the colour allows me to move forwards to share a source of Energy.”

Charlotte Culot was born in Belgium into a family of Artists. Since childhood, drawing was part of Culot’s universe. While studying Archaeology and Art History at university, she also discovered photography. Passionate about materials and colours, Culot embarked on further research throughout the world. Her eye was formed and shaped by structure of space, chromatic enrichment, and a taste for detail leading to abstraction. All of these elements were to be the source from which she would draw inspiration for future work as a painter. By 1988, Culot graduated from university with a thesis on traditional earth vernacular architecture in West Africa.

In 1990 she began to paint. Using mainly brown kraft paper to work on, she rediscovered the gouaches, pigments, and pastels from her childhood. Her taste for materials and textures led her onto the technique of collage. In time, colour has become the structural subject, space and major theme of her quest.

A colour specialist, she creates her own gouaches and applies the colours on large strips of paper that she then tears up and layers over an explosive and chaotic stream of lines. After the chaos of the first stage, the canvas seeks ‘order’ (cosmos). These ‘coloured fields’ are both figurative and literal. With her paintings and her new woven carpets (RHIZOMES Collection, limited edition) CHC is proposing to share a reservoir of energy with as many as possible.

Since 1990, Charlotte Culot has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States.
Charlotte Culot lives and works in France.