Fragments of Intimacies (The Nudes series)
- 2 days ago
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Christelle Kahla
Espace Louve
17 September to 12 October 2026
Vernissage on 17 septembre at 6PM
The body is never shown. It surfaces through fragments, through imprints, through absences.
With Fragments of Intimacies, Christelle Kahla takes over all four walls of the MAF for an immersive, 360-degree experience. Conceived as a montage of images, the exhibition extends a series begun in 2023 and first presented in early 2026 at Kunsthaus Langenthal. It brings together existing works and a new series of large formats, produced especially for Lausanne.
Each canvas is born from a gesture of projection. Using an airbrush, the paint passes through objects, lace, stockings, textiles, that act as filters. Close to the photogram, the process makes the object disappear, keeping only a spectral trace. The raw canvas then becomes a skin: stretched, marked, traversed. The subtitle The Nudes series subverts the tradition of the nude in art history: here the body is never frontal, but skirted, brushed, suggested.
The display plays on this tension. On two walls, large canvases hang without interruption, like a continuous panorama. On the walls broken by windows, the small formats scatter into sequences punctuated by ruptures and silences. Lace motifs, sprayed directly onto the floor and the central beam, extend the painting into the architecture: visitors cross the work, tread on it, activate it. Between continuity and fragmentation, presence and disappearance, painting becomes a space of contact rather than representation.
In a place dedicated to the visibility of women artists, Fragments of Intimacies offers a rereading of the nude: a fragmented, indirect approach that renders the body sensitive without ever objectifying it.
The artist
Born in 1994 in Morges, Christelle Kahla lives and works in Lausanne. A graduate of ECAL and of the Institut Kunst, Gender & Natur in Basel (Master in Visual Arts, 2019), she was in residence in 2022 at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, thanks to a grant from the Canton of Vaud. Her work, spanning painting, photography and installation, explores the tensions between revelation and concealment, softness and violence, desire and power. She evokes the body without ever depicting it directly: always suggested, fragmented, erased.