NATHALIE CAMPION - Pièces Rassemblées

Vernissage Friday Oct 3 - 6pm
Exhibition till Nov 8 2025

In Nathalie Campion's work, paint does not imitate skin: it becomes living matter.
Each surface bears its folds, scars and visible seams, like a body telling its stories. The pictorial gesture unfolds in an oscillation between instinctive brilliance and insistent repetition, a breath held, a hand that insists.

From these rough surfaces emerge presences: round heads, oversized eyes, bright red mouths. Ambivalent figures, both childlike and slightly monstrous, wavering between tenderness and cruelty. Red circles punctuate the flesh — breasts, stigmata, centres of desire or pain. Around them, almost nothing: bare, monochrome backgrounds that refocus the gaze on the essential — the figure and the gesture laid bare in their raw intensity.

Sometimes, the paint imprints itself, as if the image wanted to leave its ghostly double behind. The canvas becomes a matrix, the imprint an additional skin, layers of a body in perpetual metamorphosis. Paintings and papers also take on an almost sculptural density: folds, marks and textures transform the surface into a sensitive organism.

Fragile yet powerful, these works convey signs — scars, pulsations, beats. Childlike faces encounter the pain of bodies, reawakening buried wounds, whether personal or inherited.
The feminine and the sexual are depicted without detours: nudity as a stigma, but also as an affirmation.  Everything vibrates with an organicity where the material is flesh, the gesture a deposit, and the work a living archive. Nothing here is fixed: everything is held in tension. Beauty and discomfort, gentleness and crudeness, silence and screams coexist without cancelling each other out. It is in this ambiguity that the work strikes: it seduces as much as it disturbs.

Presented at Saint-Martin Bookshop, these figures resemble fragments of an inner narrative. They speak the language of the fragment, the trace and the scar.

Here, the unfinished is not a lack: it becomes a promise, a power of reinvention.