Armelle Caron: The Interplay of Art and Chance
Having arrived at the university this fall, the new artist-in-residence aims to forge a connection with the viewer beyond the traditional confines of an exhibition. She invites us to daydream and reflect.
Don’t ask Armelle Caron to explain her work, reveal the hidden meaning behind her pieces, or elaborate on the “message” of the drawings, prints, or other paintings that populate her world.
"I don't believe in art with a message at all; otherwise, I would have gone into advertising or written essays." she warns. It is therefore difficult for the viewer to untangle the threads of her work: in a world accustomed to judging a thing’s value by its usefulness, Armelle Caron’s approach can be quite disconcerting. Since her arrival at the university, the young visual artist has certainly piqued the curiosity of members of the community.
Art Without Labels
These encounters inspired the artist to create his first series of works produced during his residency atUM simple questions, soberly painted in watercolor on a white background, which the attentive passerby will discover posted in various locations around the university. Is an artist a researcher?; Must art meet certain expectations?; or Does the artist invite us to look or to think? These are questions that, as we can see, do not require answers but are valuable simply by their presence, by their ability to forge a connection with the viewer that is as unexpected as it is intimate.
An artist who defies labels, Armelle Caron also sees herself as boundless, having lived in no fewer than 50 different places and“grown up all over the place” in the wake of a globetrotting family. Her journey is now filled with memories of Berlin, Iceland, and New Zealand, among other places… From that youth spent on the road, the woman who has now dropped anchor in Sète has retained a love of change, travel, and exploration—on foot, by car, and even in her mind—as when she finds herself daydreaming about a stroll along the shore of a New Zealand island that happens to be, by a poetic twist of fate, the exact antipode of the place where she now lives, surrounded by the garrigue…
"Direct Contact"
Influenced by geography and the relationship to space, Armelle Caron’s work is confronted here with a new environment—the university— “a collection of scattered sites with no real center or continuity.” A “city within a city,” experienced by its users primarily as a place of passage, yet one where a very real collective life takes shape.
This unique configuration inspired Armelle Caron to develop an original presentation method: to establish “direct contact” with theuser-viewer—who is often in a hurry and rarely interested—the young artist decided to randomly insert original engravings created during her residency into the books at the Science Library.
“The university is a place where students come and go, leaving once their studies are complete and taking with them knowledge that spreads.” Armelle Caron hopes the same will be true of her works, destined to remain for years in silent anticipation of a chance encounter with a reader… or until the fate of the pulping machine reduces them to nothing. It is a sacrifice the visual artist willingly makes in exchange for the slim chance of one day receiving news of herself through a stranger who has carried one of her creations far away…
- See also:“Artists Take Over the University”