STEPHANIE CHERPIN, AN IMMIGRANT ARTIST
by CHRISTOPHE DONNER
October the 4th, 2013, Quotidien de l'Art, p.4
Stephanie Cherpin has lived in Africa and she took part in the Salon de Montrouge in 2010, where she presented a gigantic famished whale. Portrait.
She is in her thirties, she always wanted to do fine arts but she held back, nervy about Regional Cultural Affairs Councils or something like that, she therefore started more serious studies, a literature foundation course, and an intensive foundation degree in literature, a master's in philosophy, three months at Sciences Po, "a nightmare", before finally entering the fine arts school in Bordeaux.
As often happens with art studies, she mainly learnt what she already knew. What she needed to find again: Africa. Crossing through Arte Povera - Paolini style - from Franz West to Anita Molinero, she took on the gestures, the daring, the strengths of an Ivorian situation experienced at 5, 6 and 7 years old. For some, this is the age at which it happens. The electricity, the light and the sounds, fixing aesthetics, morals. Style. And she found a gallery (Cortex Athletico [Bordeaux - Paris]).
Stéphanie Cherpin is a migrant artist. She has a car with a big boot, she moves on the outskirts of the cities that commission her works, she stops in front of workshops, factories, warehouses, construction sites, sales outlets, where she detects and chooses objects, tools, machines, materials, ideas. It can take weeks. She doesn't salvage, she buys. She stuffs all of this in the boot of her big car, and brings her purchases to the place where she is supposed to create an artwork.
WHEN SHE HAS THOUGHT, TRAVELLED, ACCUMULATED ENOUGH, SHE NAILS, GLUES, ASSEMBLES, BREAKS, SAWS, CUTS, builds the monument of a childhood sorrow: what use are these objects on which we could bang to make music, these instruction manuals out of which we could make louvers, these doors behind which we don't know anything, these planks to scaffold birds and houses to empty floors, these tiles to not go up stairs, these neon lights to cook an egg, these railway tracks raised towards the sky... Often, Stéphanie Cherpin raises things.
There is anger against sophisticated, forbidden, dangerous tools, that the artist does not know how to use and that she uses anyway, in her own way. Just like the colour that sooths the standards of this very physical site where the misuse of materials is combined with the perversion of the tools. The first sometimes take the place of the latter and vice versa, in doing so, she redefines arts, because she seizes a reality of pure irony. Negritude that is finally noticed without the race hiding it, without the skin and the languages that blind its ethical questioning: what use are these things? Totem. Raising, once again, the nature of objects into gigantic animistic dolls. And doing this for the Bordeaux tramway (it's next year's project), or for the Salon de Montrouge where she will present in 2010 her gigantic famished whale, Starving in the belly of a whale. Terrifying, and at the same time fragile. Fleeting, and at the same time unforgettable. Tragic, yet at the same time modest.
Text published as part of the programme of critical supervision of the artists of the Salon de Montrouge, with the support of the city of Montrouge, the Departmental Council of Hauts-de-Seine and the Ministry of Culture and Communication.