LAUREATE CARRÉ SUR SEINE 2022

The prize Carré sur Seine 2022 was awarded to Raphaëlle Bertran "for the strength and balance invested in an analytical approach to painting that anchors the latter in a new narrative and demonstrates the power that can emanate from a work of research that weaves while remaining close to human intimacy ".

Raphaëlle Bertran constructs her paintings as narrative fragments, imprints where the intimate emerges as a stranger, an unknown presence or the absolute other, to the point of being frightening. Oil rubs shoulders with spray paint, angels rub shoulders with monsters, the sacred is stuck in the immanent. Chiseled figurines act in contrast to the informal space where they are located. A universe out of time and space takes shape and inevitably summons the world of today's disaster.

Raphaëlle Bertran is a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Among her exhibitions: 100% L'EXPO at the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, Exhibition of the 25th Antoine Marin Painting Prize, Paris, Pleins Feu at La Chapelle de Clairefontaine. She is the winner of the Alberic Rocheron Painting Prize awarded by the French Academy in 2021.

LA CASA
- exhibition-event of the winners of the Prize Carré sur Seine, from February 3 to 24, 2023 -

A bit like the halos of light executed with spray paint on her canvases around her small characters, Raphaëlle Bertran's case tends to create, she says, "a mirror effect" between the viewer and the painting. The shadow of the horse lying on the canvas "Soleil Jaune Sale" joins the tones that she draws from a thought that Van Gogh shares with his brother on the yellow "soleil citron malade". As for the installation, it is bathed in a particular climate of ruins, with the overturned objects of the suitcase, suggested by the painted details of flowers and funeral steles.