CHARLOTTE SIMONNET
GLIMPSE

RUBIS MÉCÉNAT PRIZE 2024
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH BEAUX-ARTS DE PARIS
SAINT-EUSTACHE CHURCH, PARIS, FRANCE

Born in Besançon in 2000, Charlotte Simonnet is currently studying at Beaux-Arts de Paris in the studio of Tatiana Trouvé and Dominique Figarella, entering her 5th year in September 2024. She also studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in Asier Mendizabal’s studio from August 2023 to January 2024.

Charlotte Simonnet’s sculptures and installations are built on a relationship of oxymoron, a logic of opposites in which forms and symbols borrowed from architecture, industry, nature and ornamentation are hybridised. These opposites enable her to create spaces where inside and outside, the visible and the invisible merge.

She uses these hybridisations to create sculptures that straddle the line between hostility and benevolence, many of them evolving in a dynamic of growth and dissemination. These hybridisations are positioned like metamorphoses, frozen moments in the transformation from one state to another. It’s the moment when reality and fiction, science and alchemy, come together. These sculptures contaminate the space, developing through the architecture of the building by imitating behaviours assimilated to natural and industrial environments. They spread to the structures of the exhibition spaces and sometimes to the works of other artists.

This process enables the artist to create a reality specific to the exhibition space, questioning the balance between inhabiting an environment and constructing it. The disturbed environments produced by these pieces can be seen as weavings in which the existing links between urban, social and biological structures become intertwined, superimposed and confused.

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.