Glimpse

Charlotte Simonnet is the 2024 winner of the Rubis Mécénat Prize in partnership with Beaux-Arts de Paris, which offers emerging artists from the school the chance to create an original installation for the church of Saint-Eustache. Working with curator Stéphanie Pécourt, she presented Glimpse in autumn 2024.

With Glimpse, Charlotte Simonnet pays tribute to the notion of community that permeates the church of Saint-Eustache. Using and potentializing the form of a rope, the artist evokes the bond forged between the church and its inhabitants and focuses on the use of materials and their relationship with the architecture of the church. This rhizomic installation invades the space of the church between two columns in the aisle and five chapels, following a principle of dissemination that is very present in the artist’s work.

The main installation, composed of ropes made of stained glass and concrete-reinforcing steel, bind together the columns of the church, while hammered copper plaques are scattered in the chapels. Evoking the practice of ex-votos, these hammered copper plates are the fruit of a collection of objects made by the artist from parishioners and occasional visitors to the site and reveal the counter-form of the donated objects, which are then disseminated around the church like epiphytic plants (organisms that grow using other plants as support). They will then be returned to the donors once the exhibition is over, linking the artist and the parishioners, with Saint-Eustache as the meeting point.