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CHARLOTTE MASSIP

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Scratches in time

She wanted to write about her work, her background, people who have been influential on her work. Charlotte Massip finally entrusted a close friend to tell her story. Together they went back in time, reopened diaries, ran into chisels, steel points, her print-press, literature, and masters that this engraver, who has made Bordeaux her home, has met before.

First she is asked about this new year, starting from its first projects to 2017’s exquisite unknown predictions and resolutions. Drawing will be Charlotte’s first project. This is it: she’s about to grab her pens again! She’s going to glue, she’s even going to paint!Charlotte has been engraving ever since she studied at the principal graduate printing school in Paris: the Ecole Estienne. At that time, the newly graduated teenager started discovering copper plates, scratches and incisions. Yet Charlotte missed drawing and in 1991 she headed to Claude Lapointe’s class at Les Art Déco in Strasbourg where she watched her friends’ handling of tempera.

Painstakingly, she worked flat-out with her old ball-point pens in hand – the very same ones she used when she was little, a flashback from her childhood. The curly-haired Parisian used to fly the family-owned hot air balloon, she also devoured art books at that time, she dug up anatomical slides at second-hand bookstores, the ‘bouquinistes’ on the banks of the Seine. The ever-moving city of Paris swept the runaway artist along. Holding a map of the Metro, she used to run the streets in which nothing stands still and everything is a source of inspiration. The teenager experimented with both plaster and paint cans. Her first master: Tapiès. This whirlwind of ecstatic

discoveries was suddenly blocked by the disapproval of her architect father and she was told to draw! She obeyed.

Some details

Then came a shock: she found her true expression through Fred Deux and Domenico Gnoli.This was now the time for details; hyper-realism, infinite lattices, filled with “stitches, thread and bits of rope”. Drawing made her focus again, allowing her to breathing anew, a ‘meditative state’.

She sat. In cafés, at theatres, she sketched. “I felt as if I was seeing better, listening better when I had my sketchbook… I felt closer to the actor or the musician while drawing”. Charlotte was 15. She was reading André Breton, Georges Bataille and discovered Hans Bellmer.

After Paris and Strasbourg, the young artist settled in the Balearic islands for several years. She had now made drawing her official job for more than ten years. Barefoot on the deck of an old sailing boat, she kept a tight ship. Majestic palm trees, luxurious hotels and Palma’s gothic church would cover the front side of many a postcard. Even today, when need be, she returns to Majorca’s light and warmth.

Open bodies

The continental ‘come back’ took place in Paris. She met a neighbour whose job was printing. Charlotte engraved and sold her small-format works not far from the Canal St Martin. Then she started work on anatomy: ‘my dissected bodies’, Charlotte continued. Here she exploited André Vesale’s anatomies and autopsies, as well as naked flesh and Fragonard’s powerful artistic experiments. She was

CHARLOTTE MASSIPe t c h i n g

Double d'ailes 70''x 35'', 20 prints, 2018

On the cover: Light box "Mélancolia" 75''x 31,5'', 2018

also accompanied in that deep exploration by Marcel Moreau’s sensual writings: “I touch so many things since my skin has been peeled off, that I can even touch the veneer of the appearance, which lasts as long as an illusion. I can crack it, I can bleed it, lynch it, nervously pollute it with my intramuscular, chromatic and other treasures exhumed from orgasm-liquified bodies: a state summarized by Henri Michaux” (‘Connaissance par les gouffres’, ’extract by Marcel Moreau).

Happiness: an honour to be invited for a one-year residence at the La Casa de Velasquez, the Académie de France in Madrid. Charlotte was welcomed here where she met two important printer-artists: Juan Lara and Julio Leon. “They gave me the keys to go further.” Photo-

engraving being one of them, those who read the plates and caress them. “To reveal the truth. Intaglio-engraved”. Charlotte tackled large-sized engravings, a series of female martyred saints, baroque beauties. The six-foot tall Saint Agueda, Justa, Ruffina, Inès, Ursula, Lucia and Margarita’s bodies, whose organs, bones, agonies, and entrails devouring monsters come out.

To female sufferings, the artist gave herself up. These revealed, tortured interiors told of the evil, misunderstanding and violence that are necessary, even where desire and beauty were expressed. So motherhood tears one apart, love gnaws and tears one apart. Plates are a sort of therapy, a hands-on therapy. With meticulousness, with the extreme slowness of detail,

mentally, the words are posed as the plate is scratched, manipulated, and the acid enters the scene. "My landscape is the human body." And Charlotte immersed herself in those guts, darknesses, and shadows. .

She recently came to know engraver Philippe Mohlitz in the city of Bordeaux where she now lives. Ink drawings fascinate Charlotte, as do the chiselled lines of the brilliant coppersmith artist. She recalls Jose Hernandez, well-known in Madrid, whose monstrous portrait hangs on her wall.

She also says a colourful new energy has come out. Charlotte wants to draw. She’s torn with fear yet caught by its challenge. She dreams of abstraction and projects

herself. Later, in a long time from now, she imagines herself without any table or room grappling with another dimension, that of nature. Will the bodies of men and women always express themselves? Other forces will certainly populate the artist's landscapes.

For now, Charlotte is getting ready for an important deadline. Funnily enough, it’s beside Fred Deux that we will find her in spring, at the Abbaye de Beaulieu en Rouergue for a tribute to the one who - let’s not forget it! - ‘revealed’ her true calling .

Original text by Anne Cesbron-Fourrier2017*English translations by Helen Lantsbury, 2018

Kidnapper, 28,4''x28,4'', 20 prints, 2017Ladies, 28,4''x28,4'', 20 prints, 2016

Ladies, 28,4''x28,4'', 20 prints, 2016

She wanted to write about her work, I saw Charlotte Massip's prints for the first time in the Ogami Press studio run by Juan Lara. Surprise, admiration, worry, sensuality, beauty. An unshackled imagination bubbles and runs along the acid-bitten lines, sinuous burns of an inner fire that appears in a vertical direction. Ancient echoes, Atlanteans and Caryatids, which once supported the architect of the heavens.

And these bodies that Charlotte Massip offers us show us with indifference and without modesty their anatomy, their organs, their sex, their cartilage, their bones. "Organic receptacles of my moods. "says the artist. Strange beings, in any case, coming from a surrealist and baroque heraldry, an intimate mythology that is also fed by a tradition to which Charlotte gives first and last names: Hans Bellmer, Richt Miller, Rudolf Schlitter, Fred Deux, Domenico Gnoli, Jose Hernandez, André Breton, Georges Bataille, Mikhail Boulgakov. These are the stars of her training that illuminate from afar these bodies that know they are mortal, condemned to decomposition, and that keep the memory of pleasure and pain, impermanence and the absurd, solemnity

and grotesque. Bodies with butterfly heads, emaciated skeletons wearing old shoes, passwords of tireless travellers, between life and death, or vagrants of a dream that decomposes, as in a kaleidoscope. Expression of the love of detail in the work of this artist and material revelation, of a strong and determined gesture of the tip of the steel point, the uncertain dialogue between thinking and doing.

And by blinking between these lines and spots, we discover fear, the unusual, chance, the journey, the luxury, the danger, sex, an elegant spell that both attracts and repels us. A universe housed in the realm of fantasy and wonder, an imaginary that crystallizes into a salve et coagula with powerful emotional strength and a refined and poetic reality.

Because inevitably and without escape we understand that, in Charlotte Massip's prints, there is a deep enigma, a mystery that we will never decipher, an arcane that (as Charlotte finally warns us), has its origin and foundation in the ink and blood of matter, another secret society.

Carlos Garcia-Alix 2014

The engravings of Charlotte Massip

David, print and painting,60''x30'', 2019

Spider woman, print and collage Reine des arts, 24''x24'', 20 prints

L’oiseau en moi, 33''x25'', 11 prints, 2015

Lune montante, 17''x17'', 20 prints, 2010

Némo des airs, 17''x17'', 20 prints and collage, 2010

Labyrinthe, 25''x36'', print and collage, 2013

Mes neurones, 11,8''x11,8'', 20 prints, 2016

Ancre moi, 13''x23'',20 prints, 2014

Mes 40 tentacules, 29,6''x 31'', 11prints, 2014

Mon été, 20''x20'', 20 prints, 2012

Mélancolia, 75''x32'', 11 prints, 2016

At first glance, Charlotte Massip's watercoloured etchings have something fascinating about their naturalistic aspect, which, as you approach, reveal a multiplicity of worlds offered with an exacerbated attention to detail.

The artist, born in 1971, trained at the Estienne School of Printing and then at the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts, offers an incessant and vertiginous return journey between macrocosm and microcosm by following the path of the human body.From scientific linearity, we move on to an unbridled baroque universe that recalls surrealism with joy. We must take time in front of each of these "dissected" people, who lead us into a fantastic and dreamlike world.Charlotte Massip invites us to a permanent questioning on the visible reality and the gap between it and its representation. For her, the body is as much a material as a reflection, an object of study as a subject of thought and in her work the two remain constantly overlapping. Her incisive eye finds in the technique of engraving, both sharp and intimate, the most appropriate tool.

Santa Inés, 75''x30'', 11 prints, 2013 Demoiselle, 79''x20'', 11 prints

My inspirationI was attracted by very refined by strange works such as of Hans BELLMER, Rodolf SCHLICHTER, Fred DEUX, Jose HERNANDEZ, Ri-chard LINDNER, Giorgio DE CHIRI-CO... I guess what brought me to drawing and engraving/ print was my fascination with the detail. Not any detail but the one which opens up to a deeper truth. So that whatever was linked to texture, skin, vein and hairs, was merely a thin barrier, the last one before sinking into the depths.

By eyes, thereafter, drifted very natu-rally towards imaging the body. What became to me the exemplary archi-tecture of the living was the skeleton. It seemed urgent and necessary for my artistic mind to cover the skele-ton and my experience with dissec-ted bodies. I’m not talking about the ones the anatomist refers to, but rather those whose organs- thanks to strange transgressions of biologi-cal rules- are moving, changing roles and are confronted to unexpected transplants. All this may seem ba-roque and yet it echoes what I would qualify “surgical deeds”.

One can compare the art of engra-ving/ print with delicate scalpel inci-sions whose consequences remain somewhat mysterious. My rela-tionship with copper was quite re-vealing. The cut of the metal was like surgery to me, starting from the skin, and continuing into the darkness of ink and blood of matter.Charlotte Massip

Envol, 18''x6", 2008 Poupée, 18''x6'', 2008

WALL PAPER BY LABO LÉONARD FRANCE 2018contact: http://www.labo-leonard.com

Training

1991-1994 Illustration training in the workshop of Claude Lapointe at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg1990 Ecole Supérieure d’Imprimerie Estienne, Paris, printing section

Residencies

2020 - Chosen as artist in residence in the etchings workshop Guttenberg Arts in New York : http://www.guttenbergarts.org/ (January to April,and August to October 2020). 2012/13 - The Académie de France supported me with the residence as an engraver member at the Casa de Velasquez, French Academy at Madrid.

Exhibitions

2019 - Galeria Marisa Aldeguer, Majorca, Spain - Fondation Taylor, Paris - Chapelle des Pénitents bleus, La Ciotat - Maison Louis David, Andernos-Les-Bains

2018 - Orangerie du Sénat, Paris - Galerie Maznel, Saint-Valery-sur-Somme - Centre Culturel des Carmes, Langon

2017 - Gallery The Fitzrovia, London - Exhibition “Fantasique Fantastique”. Centre d’Art de l’Abbaye in Beaulieu-en- Rouergue with the work of Fred Deux - “Etats d’âme Encrés” (“Inked states of mind”) Eglise Saint-Rémi, Bordeaux

2016 - Exhibition at the Centre Culturel André Malraux, Agen - Exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Cordes sur Ciel

2015 - Collégiale Saint-Pierre le-Puellier, Orléans - Chapelle Saint-Sauveur de Saint-Malo, « Encrées en ciel et terre » (Inked in Sky and Earth

2014 - Orangerie du Sénat, Parc du Luxembourg, Paris - Casal de Cultura ,Can Gelabert, Majorca, Spain - Galerie Atelier Blanc, Villefranche de Rouergue - “Itinérance”, (“Roaming”) Domaine Départemental of the Garenne Lemot and at l’Espace Pierre Cardin, Paris - “Hommage at F. Zurbaran” at the Institute Cervantès, Bordeaux 2013 - Personal exhibition with the works of Francisco de Zurbarán : “Devocion y Persuasion” (“Devotion and Persuasion”), Monasterio de Santa Clara, Sevilla, Espagne. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgv240GCYrw 2012 - Galerie des Tanneries, Nérac. - Rosa Maria Concept Gallery, Beyrouth, Liban - Centre Culturel San Benito, Calatayud, Spain - Estampa, print fair, Matadero, Madrid 2009 - Salons du Minotaure, Vendôme - Musée de la Halle Saint-Pierre, Paris

2008 - Galerie L’âne bleu, Marciac, Gers, France 2007 - Galerie de Wégimont, Liège, Belgique - Galerie Fürstenberg, Paris. Parution de Mes drôles de disséqués (Publication of my Strange Dissections), accompagnied by a text́ by Marcel Moreau, Editions Régnier, Belgium Selected international prizes for etching

- First prize Salon d’Automne en gravure, Paris, 2017 - Prix international René Carcan. Belgique en 2018 - Prix de la Gravure. Centre de la Louvière, Belgique, 2016 - GRAV’X, Paris, 2013 - Prix Jean Anouilh, Salon d’Automne, 2015

Participation in selected biannual etching exhibitions

2019 - Selected for the 14th International Prize of Graphic Arts Carmen Arozena in the Casa de la Moneda museum in Madrid and to the Canary islands in the Casa Salazar, la Palma. 2018 - Bankside Gallery, London - Tama Art University Museum Tokyo, Japan

2017 - Ankara, Turkey - Conflans Sainte-Honorine, France - Estampa, Madrid, Spain - Varna, Bulgaria - Xuyuon, China

2015 - Society of French printer-engravers des Peintres- Graveurs, Paris

Series of Icons, 10''x6'', 2018

À la recherche à la fois joyeuse et désespérée de son propre corps, contenant obligé d’un être menacé de trop de tentations, douloureusement éprouvé ou secoué d’allégresse selon les circonstances chahuteuses de sa vie, Charlotte travailleuse – thérapeute d’elle-même – cisèle et ornemente, figure ou défigure, éparpille ou as-semble, dissèque ou mécanise ses propres restes, présents ou à venir.

Charlotte, a worker – therapist of herself – chisels and adorns, shapes or disfigures, scatters or assembles, dissects or brings to life her own ‘remains’, what is present or to come.

Puzzle bodies, ink and print, 24''x 43''

Ni queue ni botte, ink and print, 43''x 24''

Series of icons, 10''x10''- 2019

MAJA RX , 27,5''x 49''- 2019

Extract from the text of Georges RubelUnivers des Arts 1er avril 2018

…In a joyful and desperate search for her own body, containing a being threate-ned with too many temp-tations, painfully tested or shaken with joy according to her life’s hectic circums-tances, Charlotte, a worker - therapist of herself - chisels and adorns, shapes or disfigures, scatters or as-sembles, dissects or brings to life her own ‘remains’, what is present or to come.

These vehement operations do not go without many borrowings and references: the era is greedy of itself, of its ancient and recent culture, and access to all the images and books is open to this avid reader. Michelangelo and Cranach are part of it, and, on closer inspection, there are other perfidious quota-tions, from various eras, intertwined in a tangle of lace, also worth a careful detour.

The final composition will be like the worrying recons-truction of a jigsaw with finely crafted pieces. The total image - the whole reconstituted body, found again - will only be readable during the vertical arrangement of the frames, like an old predella that would have been maliciously straightened, or a comic strip: here, finally, after many detours, the artist placed facing herself. A temporary self, fortunately, and the process is, for the pleasure of the viewer that we are, never interrupted. More shrewd reflections are to come…

COLLECTION OF LIGHT BOXES by Charlotte Massip

LIGHT BOXE : «Etreinte»

https://youtu.be/HTEwIKArnb4https://youtu.be/-mN-zxSLopk

An engraved coppered patchwork

It is the result of 15 years of hard work as an engraver of several original copper matrices. These engraved plates, covering like a second skin the interior walls of a space ( like this prism but it could just as easily represent an elevator or any other existing area), would create a superb and raw effect.

I would love to stage these copper sheets so as to give the impression of “crui-sing through copper”.Staging of my peculiar anatomies engraved on copper plates, upholstering the walls of a hall to bring more life to “the crossing of the bites and the maze of the human body” ,(examplary architecture loaded with my different states of mind) full size.The reflections on the copper plates brought about by the right lighting will en-gulf them in a coppered, gorgeous and fascinating light.

This short movie: https://youtu.be/iir4CgWo-Vc will give you a more concrete idea of the installation,named "Travesare 1085°" -copper fusion point.It is an incursion into the bites and the maze of the body.

*Note that the colors of the copper plates in these pictures, are not faithful to the real ones that render much better the reddish golden glow of the copper.

«One must have chaos within oneself in order to give birth

to a dancing star.»

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Charlotte MassipWhatsapp 33(0)6 10 37 28 27

www.charlottemassip.com

[email protected]

Née en France en 1971

Artiste membre graveur, Académie de France à Madrid,

Casa de Velázquez, 2012/2013 Tango, print 20, 70''x 33''

Film at the studio: https://youtu.be/ouZ6WnkiHQA

Animated film: https://youtu.be/9Rh56Vg9358

Tango, original copper plates, 65''x30''