FDL 120 Parcours S. Pheulpin

parcours - Profile 121 <
s’apparente à une méditation ».
Sa renommée s’est construite
d’abord à l’étranger. « En France, dès
qu’il s’agissait de textile, c’était relégué
à l’ouvrage de dame, tandis que
les Anglo-Saxons sont plus ouverts à
la matière : verre, bois, textile… »,
explique-t-elle. Mais le monde de
l’art a changé. « Aujourd’hui, je
récupère les jalons que j’ai plantés ! »
En 2015, l’artiste a remporté le
Prix du Créateur de la Fondation
Ateliers Arts de France, toutes
matières confondues, et ses œuvres
sont exposées chez Art Curial à
Paris, et chez divers galeristes à
l’étranger. Cet automne, Simone
Pheulpin va inaugurer son premier
“one-woman show” à Paris ; une
trentaine d’œuvres seront exposées
à la Chapelle Expiatoire à partir du
10 novembre avec, comme pièce
maîtresse, une création XXL, d’un
volume jamais réalisé par l’artiste. p
Alissa Demorest
ful decorative panels for children’s
rooms. So why this desire for a ‘noncolor’
in her artwork? “I don’t want
to work with color, it’s as simple as
that! I’m not fond of white, it looks
aggressive to me, but off-white, or
ivory, plays with light and has an
inherent softness.”
While Pheulpin believes that “the
material itself calls the shots,” when
she is working, she derives her inspiration
from nature. “Trees, fissures
in rock, stratum… I can be
mesmerized faced with a crack in
the pavement as much as if I’m
standing at the lip of a volcano,” she
muses. Her work is in constant evolution:
the layering of fabric has
given rise to transformative details
like spaces and crevices within the
folds. “For my series Anfractuosités,
I learned how to work with emptiness
as I created hollow spaces in
the folds,” she recalls. “What I love
best is the repetitiveness, always
At first glance, it seems
surprising that a brut
hank of fabric could be
the starting point for
a poetic body of work.
Mono-material, mono-color… For
Simone Pheulpin, artist, mother
and grandmother, the material is
an extension of her own history. “It
starts in the Vosges, where I lived,
grew up and where I still call home.
As a child, I played in the textile
factories at a time when there were
many of them. Today, only one
remains,” she explains. This rough
cotton fabric was first used to line the
insides of tires, before the invention
of inner tubes. “It’s amusing to think
that a run-of-the-mill material can
be turned into something precious,”
she says. Pheulpin cuts, folds and
pins the material into place “like an
accordion”; some pieces use up to
five kilograms of pins!
She began her career creating colormaking
the same gesture. It’s like a
form of meditation.”
Pheulpin’s artistic career first took
off abroad. “In France, when art centered
on textile, it was considered
‘ladies’ handiwork, whereas in
Anglo-Saxon countries there was a
pronounced interest in materials like
glass, wood and textile,” she notes.
But times have changed. “I’m now
reaping the seeds I sowed,” she
enthuses. In 2015, the artist took
home the Creator Prize (all artistic
categories combined) from France’s
Fondation Ateliers Arts de France
and her work is currently on show at
Art Curial in Paris. This autumn,
Pheulpin will hold her first onewoman
show in Paris, a retrospective
of thirty pieces at the neo-baroque
Chapelle Expiatoire from November
10. The star of the show will be a
new creation—Pheulpin’s largest
and most imposing work to date. p
Alissa Demorest
formes de luxe - septembre - september 2017