CHRISTIANE FILLIATREAU

“It is no doubt no coincidence that Christiane Filliatreau has chosen to set up her studio on a restanque carved into the side of the old strategic gorge that crosses the Luberon. Here is the artist herself shaped by this landscape which she has married and which suits her so well, anchored between the mineral with its powerful shapes polished by time and the vegetable earth deposited here as a jewel to be worked with vigour and perseverance. If Christiane dedicates the blue of her eyes to it, the sharp gaze of the beings of altitude that crosses her to the tips of her fingers, she draws inspiration from deep within herself, which is nourished by ancient memories well beyond her childhood land: in the hollow of a Maghreb wadi, alone away from her mother’s vigilance, she was already beginning to shape her kingdom.
The creative breath in her seems to draw from the depths, but the gestures of ordinary life still serve and nourish it: between the pure sequences of creation, the lively hands could appear idle. On the contrary, they are busy preparing the earth, dancing around the sink, tidying up, scraping the tables in the studio. Signs of an intense concentration to feel how they will reach and express the idea which is imperative, which announces itself, doubt will only have place later. A gestation is at work…
However, there is no question of limiting oneself to reading in Christiane’s work the manifest attributes of femininity and the hollow symbols that are attached to it, in order to realise that the artist is not only satisfied with this completeness or harmony through the bipolarity of the sexes.
She seems to go even further, exalting her own femininity as a matrix, receptive, essential force in which her creative power originates. Accepting through her works, to go towards this essential of her own metamorphosis. She tames the hollow in her, goes to meet it to marry it. She often says “that her pieces are technically hollow, but not empty. ”

Text by Myriam Boutrolle