NATHALIE CAMPION - Pièces Rassemblées

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

In Nathalie Campion’s work, painting does not imitate skin: it becomes living matter. Each surface retains its folds, its scars, its visible seams, like a body telling its own stories.

The pictorial gesture oscillates between instinctive outburst and insistent reprise, like a suspended breath, a hand that insists, giving form to what might be described as a temporality held in suspense.

From these textured strata emerge presences: round heads, disproportionate eyes, vivid red mouths. Ambivalent figures, at once childlike and unsettling, wavering between tenderness and cruelty.
Red circles punctuate the flesh, functioning simultaneously as anatomical markers, stigmata, and sites of desire or pain. Around them, almost nothing: bare, monochrome grounds that draw the gaze back to the essential — the figure and the gesture, laid bare in their raw intensity.

At times, painting leaves its own imprint, as if the image sought to cast its ghostly double. The canvas becomes a matrix, the imprint another skin, strata of a body in perpetual metamorphosis.

The materiality of Campion’s practice is not confined to painting. It acquires an almost sculptural density: folds, marks, and textures transform the surface into a sensitive organism.
Fragile yet powerful, these works carry signs — scars, pulsations, heartbeats. Childlike faces meet the pain of bodies, awakening buried wounds, intimate or inherited.

The feminine and the sexual emerge here without evasion: nudity appears both as stigma and as affirmation, far from any smooth idealisation. Beauty seems to reside not in the intact, but in the persistence of the mark, in the inscription of lived experience.

Nothing here is fixed: everything holds within tension. Beauty and unease, softness and rawness, silence and cry coexist without ever canceling each other. It is in this ambiguity that the work strikes: it seduces as much as it unsettles.

Presented at Saint-Martin Bookshop, these figures appear as fragments of an inner narrative, works that speak the language of trace, suture, and incompletion. Yet here, the unfinished is not lack: it is potential, a promise of reinvention and an affirmation of the visible.

 

Nathalie Campion (b. 1964, Belgium) is a self-taught visual artist whose practice unfolds between ceramic sculpture and painting. Known for her distinctive exploration of matter, she combines fragility and strength to tell the story of the interdependence between humanity and nature.

A member of BeCraft, she has gained international recognition, including selections for the Keramik Museum Westerwald Ceramic Prize (Germany) and the Aveiro International Ceramics Biennale (Portugal). Her works are part of major collections, including the Jose Noé Suro Collection and the Keramik Museum Westerwald (2024/25).She has been awarded numerous artist residencies, including at Atelier Pierre Culot in Belgium (2018–2022), the Institut Français – Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece (2021), Cerámica Suro in Mexico (2022), Le Charbonnage in Belgium (2023), as well as a cross-residency with South African artist Belinda Blignaut.

Her solo exhibitions include OV17 (2019), The Solo Project at Atelier Jespers (2022), I’ve Lost My Head at JF Kugel Gallery (2022), and Autofiction: dans la peau de l’écorce at La Chapelle de Boondael with Lee Bauwens Gallery (2023). In 2026, she will present a new solo exhibition at the Huefinghen Museum in Germany.She has also taken part in numerous international group exhibitions, including at the Luxelakes A4 Art Museum (China, 2020), Spazio Nobile (Belgium, 2021), MAD Gallery (Poland, 2022), and First GDL (Mexico, 2024). Her participation in major art fairs such as Art Brussels, the Collectible Design Fair, and Ceramic Brussels  has further established her reputation, combining material mastery with conceptual depth.

Her training has been shaped by both formal and informal experiences across Europe: at the Atelier Pierre Libre in Paris (2016–2017), the Saint-Gilles Academy in Brussels (2022), and through collaborations with renowned ceramicists such as P. Duguet and A. Coissieux in France. Before fully committing to art, she worked as an assistant to florist Thierry Boutemy (2010–2018) and was also involved in urban agriculture projects in Paris.

Drawing on transgenerational memory, nature, and embodied experience, Campion continues to develop a poetic and sensitive practice where vulnerability, resilience, and the tension between isolation and connection intertwine into an organic language at the heart of her work.

The exhibition Pièces Rassemblées is organized in collaboration with Spax Projects.