Delphine Costier - visual artist
- Jan 26
- 3 min read
Delphine Costier, the breath of the world
For Delphine Costier, everything begins in silence. The silence that is not absence, but listening. Listening to the world, to materials, to the invisible breath of things. Her work is a breathing space, a slow crossing where each gesture becomes a way of inhabiting time. Nothing rushes there, everything happens at its own rhythm, in an economy of means that reveals the essential: a trace, a light, a vibration.
Her work is rooted in a profound awareness of the living and in the need to slow down. Painting becomes a form of meditation, an act of presence to the world. Delphine does not seek to represent, but to reveal what persists in the imperceptible. She creates in a physical, almost choreographic relationship with matter. The gesture is precise, but open, measured, patient. It embraces the slowness of the process, repeats itself, transforms, like a breath that settles and withdraws.
White, omnipresent, is for her a language in its own right. Far from being neutral, it contains all colors, all memories. It is the place of appearance, of disappearance, a threshold between light and shadow. In her various series, this vibrant white dialogues with transparencies, thicknesses, materials she works with care. Surfaces become skins, sensitive territories, crossed by micro-variations of texture and light. We read there the passages of time, the respirations of matter, or the memory of gestures.
The series L'Instant présent (The Present Moment) evokes the slow transformation of the world. The superimposed layers recall the movements of water and wind, the fragility of natural elements. Each work bears the trace of an erasure, a slow disappearance, but also a rebirth. Cocons (Cocoons), on the other hand, speaks of shelter, of regeneration, of those places where life reconstitutes itself. Delphine mingles there fibers, threads, recycled fabrics, fragments of family textiles. Each material, bearer of memory, becomes witness to a continuity between past and present. These suspended threads, sometimes left visible, evoke the fabric of the living, the bond, the persistence of roots.
Her painting is built around a dialogue between control and letting go, between rigor and intuition. She seeks the right balance, the one that allows gesture to exist without dominating. For her, painting is not producing an image, but reaching a state of being, as she likes to say. In the studio, everything happens slowly. The brush touches lightly, rubs, removes, adds. Time stretches, the gaze settles. This slowness is an act of resistance: a refusal of frenzy, a way to preserve an inner space.
Delphine chooses her supports with the same attention. She favors recycled materials, papers already marked, recovered textiles. They bear the trace of the world, of uses, of daily life. Nothing is left to chance, but everything remains open to accident. She speaks of her canvases as breathing places, living organisms that continue to evolve once finished. Painting is never fixed: it continues in the gaze of the beholder, in the air it traverses.
There is, in her approach, a will to appeasement, but also a profound lucidity about the fragility of existence. Each work is an attempt at balance between solidity and erasure, between memory and forgetting. The traces she leaves on the canvas resemble those that time imprints on things, discreet and persistent. Delphine paints the slow metamorphosis of the world, the flow of time, the beauty of what disappears.
Her works invite us to slow down, to contemplate, to pay attention to what we no longer see. In this silent face-to-face with matter, we discover another way of existing: gentler, more grounded, truer. Because, for Delphine Costier, painting means breathing. And breathing is already a way of creating.
Dr. Marie Bagi
Director of the Musée Artistes Femmes (MAF)
Published November 4, 2025
