Sophie Bosselut - visual artist
- 17 hours ago
- 5 min read
Today I present to you artist Sophie Bosselut, who warmly welcomed me to her home and former studio. Thanks to Laura Zimmermann and social media, I had the opportunity to discover her talented work.
About two years ago, Sophie, originally from France, moved to Switzerland with her husband and three-year-old son, Gabriel. Since settling in, she has sought a way to reconcile her artistic work with her role as a mother. She thus evokes the difficulty of being a woman and an artist at the same time, for all that this entails. Indeed, there is not really any help for artist mothers since being an artist is not always considered a full-fledged profession—much to our dismay. This should naturally change and of course, it is my duty to contribute to it, I tell her. As an artist, Sophie was not among the priority mothers to find a daycare spot and, like many, had to wait a long time before her son was accepted into one that, by chance, opened next to her studio. Nevertheless, during this time as a "full-time mom," she created a series titled Sieste (Nap) (2018-19); created in a short time and gathering all her creative frustration, when Gabriel slept and she finally had a little time to create. From that moment, Sophie began painting in series.
Artistic creation began when Sophie discovered her calling at twelve or thirteen. Indeed, she wrote poems, drew, and painted. Holding a bachelor's degree in visual arts after time at the Toulouse Fine Arts School, it was finally at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris that she oriented herself and specialized in photography and video—where she received the jury's congratulations. She worked extensively on the image through video vignettes where she staged herself. Questions of the body and representation of women became essential. She went so far as to distance herself from so-called canons of beauty and aesthetics by depicting herself in not always flattering postures where her body was deliberately mistreated.
She also used contemporary dance to express herself and pushed the body's limit to its dematerialization through the experience of trance. She confides to me that she likes to "create films for herself" in order to enter another reality where the body's limits are no longer a brake on her creativity. Video allowed her to stage intimate episodes of her daily life such as a video on hair removal Sexepelle (2005). Body hair is heavy with meaning, she continues. It is humanity's animality that emerges and in the face of it, fear is born and the desire to eradicate it is present; this act is done through wax strips that she applies to different parts of the body and then removes. Sophie then tells me that when she made her films, she felt she was no longer herself; in the sense that it was art expressing itself and not her. She went so far as to do unconventional things in the service of art; just like Marina Abramović (1946), she is not afraid to transcend art's limits. Thus, she recounts an episode where she exposed her body to radiation for a video titled Cocoon (2001-02) after the AZF explosion. In small bodies of water, she lay down like a lifeless body like "Ophelia" (1851-1852) by John Everett Millais (1829-1896). A kind of trash Ophelia, she tells me laughing.
Unfortunately, Sophie cannot find the video. Viennese Actionism, she tells me, greatly inspired her at that time, through the tortured aspect it conveys. This has changed over time. Sophie continues by sharing with me the creation of her works. She tells me that she materializes the sensitive and invisible because, through this, she transmits something stronger than words. The fact of realizing it through various media gives the work a magic that is impossible to find in oral expression. There is also a very strong link with lineage in her video work; notably in her short films Tête à tête (Face to Face) (2009) and Plexus solaire (Solar Plexus) (2015). The first invites us to travel between three generations of women and highlights a kind of "feminine trinity." The second is made in her great-grandmother's apartment where she stages a mysterious woman, chimerical, like a gorgon against a backdrop of alchemical desire. This idea of alchemy as well as the question of the mystical between eras, through art, is a means for Sophie to transmit the invisible. The force of energy is like a solar furnace that allows us to pierce through a woman's pain.
Passionate about walking, it is in her wanderings that Sophie draws her inspiration. Sophie continues by mentioning that being a videographer did not bring her the same immediate sensation as being a visual artist. Indeed, it became important for her to touch matter. This gives her a physical proximity with her work that she did not always have with video. This need was already felt in 2011 when she decided, at the end of her studies, to create with two artists from Decorative Arts, Elise Benard and Sarah Cohen, a drawing collective named "Les 3xquises" whose drawings you can admire at http://lesexquises.over-blog.com/. Each of them was created within a very specific framework and functions by series of nine drawings like an epistolary correspondence where the artists "dialogue" and respond to each other via the web. They draw directly from the "exquisite corpse" to create an artistic language of their own. The collaboration lasted six years. Still in a surrealist approach, she created with Sarah Cohen a duo called Rose Eloïse where intuition and automatic drawing give form to strange spirals that function as narratives inspired by listening to chosen texts—poetry or philosophy, notably.
Sophie continues by showing me what she created in drawing but also painting, including a series where we find elements of the human body such as muscle fibers with syringes, stomachs with intestines that she titled Essaims cliniques (Clinical Swarms) (2011). The "not clean" side must emerge to demonstrate the visceral reality that the viewer is led to confront; their dripping aspects show a dirty side to return to the very essence of what is. Moreover, the series Saccage/mirage/sabotage (Havoc/mirage/sabotage) (2019) extends it where guts and viscera become protagonists of the scene. The choice of color brings life to the composition and will capture the public's gaze: a certain interpretation of the world will then be exposed. The dialogue between microcosm and macrocosm is important here and relates a precise memory from her childhood when she looked through her grandfather's microscope—a pharmacist and biologist—just like the starry sky. A cosmic vision and biological vision will then be present in Sophie's compositions, which in 2019 went so far as to represent Contagion with a series whose work is realized through stratification and interconnection of disparate elements. The body, this time in agony, presents effects of proliferation and thus an accumulation of forms that are like presences: a total immersion in the canvas.
These abstract forms are then found more and more in her works and become the main protagonists. During the first lockdown, Sophie created a small series of abstract drawings Cage thoracique (Rib Cage), Wassily Kandinsky style (1866-1944), where she added electrodes that bear witness to a hospitalization due to the situation. In her pictorial work, there is always a confrontation between line/drawing and mass/painting. From this is born the movement in which a universe is formed where the living takes its full place.
Her works, she tells me laughing, are organized chaos where the mixture of forms intertwine and dialogue. Guided by her profound calling, Sophie creates works that capture the public's attention and where the desire to know more becomes urgent. I look forward to welcoming them to the Space and for her to transmit to you the origin of her talent.
Author: Marie Bagi, Director of MAF & PhD in Contemporary Art History and Philosophy
Published December 14, 2020
