Born in 1965 and working in Pélussin, visual and performance artist Christine Coste works on the interweaving of three specific plastic fields around the issue of the body: ceramics, drawing and performance. Her work is an incessant to-and-fro between these territories.
The artist often explores notions of fragment and hybridization, as in the series of ceramic sculpturesFaux-semblant, Capsule 3D, Apnée, Camisole or Corpusgraphie, where the human merges with the animal, bodies adorned with plundering surfaces or clothing elements. Faces are often hidden or obliterated, as if to better convey the nature of these creatures driven by metamorphosis, encounter, the search for identity, emancipation.
The body in its grip, the shape that mutates, interior/exterior circulation: these issues can also be perceived in the series of large-format drawings Utérin. Born of a weave of repetitive graphic meshes, the bodies vibrate like living cells. Layers overlap, interact and create a spectral and sensual phenomenon.
“Then it will be about desire, which circulates freely, all genres combined. Then it will be about wet, fluid things in a faceless face-to-face, in deaf time. Then it will be a question of fire-tempered ectoplasm, rain-tempered jellyfish…”
In his performances illico*, Pdt, Fragile, Les femmes sans têtes, Souffles, Proxémie, M’inscrire, La vie commence maintenant, Making narratives and those, named under the generic title of Terra incognita, the artist re-enacts the forces at play in her graphic practice: sensual body, obliterated, dilated, animated or chosified.
Drawn from her bodily memory, Christine Coste embodies narratives in her installations as well as in her drawings and performances. The process of unveiling becomes conscious with the [majøtik] series made up of 275 A3-sized drawings made every day for 9 months.
In this universe, at once offensive and gentle, figurative markers tend to blur. Form and content become one. Bodies – those drawn by Christine Coste, but also her own – move freely in a space that tends towards the immersive and intimate landscape.