Biography
Clothilde Lasserre grew up in an inspiring family that always encouraged her to follow her convictions, which played a decisive role in the development of her artistic career.
Clothilde Lasserre trained as a doctor of mathematics and has devoted herself entirely to her work as an artist for the past twenty years. Colourful and symbolic, her work bears witness to the need for each of us to cultivate our individuality while learning to live together.
For twenty years, Clothilde Lasserre has run her painting studio, then her sculpture studio, listed with Ateliers d’Art de France. Trained in renowned workshops at La Borne and Sèvres in France, she acquired the specific, age-old techniques of porcelain and stoneware — noble, demanding materials that have allowed her to extend her singular language.
Her artistic path reflects a vision of society resolutely turned towards sharing and universal exchange.
She has been presenting her work to the public since 2003 and has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in France and abroad, notably in Paris, Lille and Nantes, as well as in Brussels.
Between solo exhibitions, contemporary art fairs and art salons, her work is regularly rewarded.
Clothilde Lasserre’s works are represented by art galleries and are held in private collections in Singapore, New York, the United Kingdom, Belgium and France.
Artistic approach
The singularity of Clothilde Lasserre’s work lies not only in the precision of her craftsmanship, but also in her artistic stance, which offers a sensitive and illuminating reflection on the issues and challenges of our society.
From the top of La Défense in Paris, her artist’s eye watched masses of people moving, seen from above. This view from above gradually nourished an artistic vision that stages the crowd.
The artist conveys the dynamics of human relationships, where bonds are woven and encounters take shape, reminding us how important it is to believe in others.
Both her paintings and her sculptures explore the need for human beings to cultivate their singularity while learning to live together.
Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, her compositions embody the tug-of-war between multitude and unity. She expresses the delicate balance between preserving our individuality and our need for contact with others.
When asked “How do you know a painting is finished? It seems that one more figure, or one less, would make no difference”, the artist explains that every person matters to the coherence of the scene, and describes the long work needed to reach that balance. She says with conviction that each of us has a place in society, and that we must not let ourselves be overwhelmed by the feeling of being drowned in the crowd, by the anxiety of the unknown, or by the artifice of meeting people on social networks.
Porcelain and stoneware, a logical choice. The individual appears to be drowned in the multitude, but this is not so: with her, each individual regains a place in society, a network of humans all necessary to the balance of the whole.
“Man is a sociable being; nature made him to live with his fellows.” — Aristotle
Echoing Baudelaire, she explores this tension between solitude and multitude: “Multitude, solitude: equal and convertible terms for the active and fertile poet. He who does not know how to people his solitude does not know how to be alone in a busy crowd either.”
– Charles Baudelaire, “Les Foules”, Le Spleen de Paris.
Inspirations
Globalisation or withdrawal into oneself?
A beneficial back-and-forth
Every culture chooses to invest preferentially in a certain number of values of its own.
Thus the ethnocentric illusion leads us to believe that any culture that has made choices different from ours is inferior to ours. Hence the illusion of inferior cultures. It therefore becomes necessary to confront differences in order to open up, evolve and see things differently.
Clothilde Lasserre’s crowds, varied or tending towards homogeneity, express this paradox.
“To progress, there must be collaboration between different cultures, each contributing something. Yet the things thus pooled produce homogenisation, and thereby prevent any future collaboration, since there will be nothing left to share.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss – Race and History
TEXTS: The artist seen from above, seen by others
Clothilde Lasserre’s paintings are full of captivating energy.
Combining instinctive brushwork, bold colours and a relentless sense of composition, her Crowds waltz between figuration and abstraction. A perpetual back-and-forth between an inner life and vital contact with the Other, expressed through zooming in and stepping back.
Clothilde Lasserre has long been working on identity. The paradox of every individual: fitting in, and therefore not standing out, while keeping one’s own individuality so as not to lose oneself.
Verticality may make us hesitate:
It is not really a bird’s-eye view (generally a diagonal view, or a perspective from a fairly close point), nor a view from a plane (closer to the vertical and much further away), nor from a star (the point of view of Sirius, which puts all negative effects into perspective since it is the closest star to the sun).
We would arrive at the divine point of view, which can also grasp space without taking time into account (sub specie aeternitatis, as Spinoza put it, though this can also be a project for any human thinker). What makes it possible to think Clothilde Lasserre’s gaze lies elsewhere. There is a defamiliarised gaze here, moving away from the face-to-face, very close to the vertical if not vertical, yet not very distant, and taking movement into account. It is not, however, an aerial vision linked to the invention of aviation and the postcards that followed.
This is a highly conceptual approach, a true “cosa mentale”, as with Leonardo. We see things from above, but without any sign of domination. For shifting one’s view in this way is indeed a spiritual exercise.
Jean-François Clément
Clothilde Lasserre’s painting reflects an unusual path in the contemporary art world.
She did not come to painting by chance, but out of necessity: as the only way to express and share her understanding of the world, her exaltations and her anxieties; as her testimony to how hard it is to live together while being unique. Her crowds are undoubtedly its finest expression — crowds of individuals drowned in an alienating mass, yet whose colours so well express the richness and diversity of beings. And of souls too.
Clothilde did not go to art school, nor even take painting lessons. She respects the masters but owes nothing to teachers, and draws great freedom of expression from this. Her technique is strong, but it is only the extension of her desire to put the emotions of our lives into colour. With this innate sense of colour as her only guide, Clothilde went straight to oil on canvas. From the outset her brush appears powerful, her line rhythmic, yet her light remains sensual. When asked what her style is, which category she belongs to, she often replies: “Ah, boxes, pigeonholes? Painting came to find me so I could escape the world of boxes. I won’t go back.” Marie Jouan Gondouin – Gallery owner
Even so, art professionals regard her painting as figurative-expressionist, sometimes verging on the abstract. Before becoming a painter, Clothilde was a mathematician. From this school of absolute rigour she brought into her work the power of symbols and the art of language. Mathematics is a disciplined poetics; painting is a poeticised discipline. Both make it possible to tell the world as it is, or as we would like it to be. Her snowy landscapes owe a little to fractals, her crowds a great deal to chaos theory — the story of a world that believes itself organised but which, at a single impulse, tips into panic, violence, jubilation or unbridled passion. It is no surprise, then, that her works have found an enthusiastic audience, in China in particular, the country of crowds if ever there was one.
Yet her main subject is not so much the crowd as Humankind, and the fragility that leads us to give up our individuality in order to feel less vulnerable. Her handling of oil and colour creates urban scenes in which we first see, again and again, the crowd — until her framing and her light lead us to recognise ourselves as one among the others. Clothilde’s work moves us because it speaks of each of us.
