Drawing Now 2022

For this new edition of Drawing Now, we are pleased to present the work of two artists we regularly accompany: Claire Trotignon and Lionel Sabatté. Their creations will enter into dialogue with the equally singular work of an artist from London who has never been presented to Drawing Now collectors: Amélia B.  

IN FOCUS: CLAIRE TROTIGNON

Nominated for the Drawing Now 2022 prize, Claire Trotignon has specifically created new pieces that demonstrate a mutation in her style with the eruption of large, colorful gouache-based areas. 

Claire Trotignon (born in 1984, France) 

Lives and works in Paris and Tours.

Through drawing and cutting, Claire Trotignon builds on paper and draws in space. Extending the line and the weft of recomposed fragments, the artist implements the collision of heterogeneous elements, shattering the traditional perspectival aspect and the linear narration to give rise to new space-time. The conjunction of landscape/architecture/cartography generates, for her, a form of ruin, becoming at the same time the symbol of a loss and of a reading in reserve of our reality. Each year a solo exhibition is dedicated to her by a French institutional art place (FRAC IDF, CAC Le Shed, Centre Pompidou-Metz). His work has been presented in France and abroad (Fondation Louis Vuitton, Venice Architecture Biennale, FIAC, Untitled Miami). Her work has been included in public collections (Collection Société Générale, BnF, FMAC, New York Public Library) and numerous private collections. 

Amélia B. (born in 1991, France)

Lives and works in London.

A true revelation of the last two years, Amélia B. (Amélie Barnathan) is a young artist who has just graduated from the Royal College of Arts, London. Amelia B.'s art is anything but innocent. It disorients, upsets, questions by its ability to deconstruct the construction of identities in young contemporary women. Her drawings, enhanced with gouaches of a sumptuous delicacy, present young girls at the end of adolescence, a moment of discovery of desire and especially of confrontation with a world where communication technologies lock up more than they liberate the female body and its imagination. These scenes offer the image of characters put to the torture by their double even. The flesh is exposed, the limbs twisted under the action of clinical machines. However, there is nothing real in these representations, but phantasmagorias of human beings who have become desiring machines. All the merit and beauty of these representations rest on a tension between a subject and the perfect mastery of a technique of drawing and gouache. The decorations deploy surprising pastel shades especially present in luxuriant jungles. Of a formidable effectiveness, the art of Amélia B. asserts itself as a radical questioning on an obscure and ignored part of the female psyche in the face of the crushing weight of a normalizing society seeking to lock women in a series of stereotyped roles. 

Lionel Sabatté (born in 1975, France) 

Lives and works in Paris.

Lionel Sabatté brings out the living, the beautiful, the timeless from dead, despised or discarded materials. He transcends what society commonly calls "waste". The contents of vacuum cleaner bags become birds, dust collected in the subway becomes wolves, a stump of dead wood becomes a chimera, hair becomes faces, oxidized industrial steel plates become landscapes, dead skin provided by a podiatrist becomes flowers... The sculptor who has become a sweeper, a gleaner, a recycler, an over-cycler... reveals himself as the creator of another relationship to time, which finally finds its loop, its elastic eternity. Prehistory, caves, abysses, insularity, the first forms of life are the backdrop of a work that invites animals, alchemy, organic life to take shape and to cohabit in harmony with the human being. The artist, born in 1975, who grew up on the island of Reunion, was still hesitating to become a judo teacher when he entered the Beaux-Arts in Paris. Since then, he has been walking around with his naturalness at the height of man and terraced life. The artist swallows as an ogre the excesses of the consumer society to spit out creatures connected to the living, geniuses, druids, endowed with the immanent spirit of life. (Text Alice Audouin)