List of products by brand Charlotte Bovy

After studying theater and literature in New York, Charlotte turned to photography. Her earliest images immediately revealed a sensitivity to black and white and questioned our relationship with time and memory.

Photography often serves as the starting point for her explorations. She uses it as both material and medium in a process of visual reconstruction. Cut, recomposed, fragmented, assembled, reinterpreted—here, photography becomes a material to be constantly reworked.

The fragmentation of images is central to her artistic approach and has taken different forms over the years: collages, imprints, photographic installations, videos, drawings… Above all, it is the staging of images that drives her, along with the infinite possibilities of inventing new narratives.

“For this series, Solastalgie, the artist settled in the forest of Fontainebleau. This relocation is significant. The young artist chose to join the forest of the artists. It was here, alongside painters such as Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, that the ‘primitives’ of photography—like Gustave Le Gray or Eugène Cuvelier—worked. This forest, a matrix of the arts, is a challenge for a young contemporary artist and photographer.

How does one enter this ‘open-air museum’ and measure oneself against these famous gazes that shaped the way we see, and even how we conceive, the tree? With the trees in this series, through an orthogonal grid that seems to multiply perspectives, Charlotte Bovy starts from scratch, in a sense taking the measure of these giants of the Fontainebleau forest. Beautiful and enigmatic, like the ‘cartoons’ of a marvelous black-and-white stained glass, they radiate a power of their own, emphasized by the mesh overlay, reminiscent of the Renaissance enlargement technique of ‘transferring’ a drawing onto tiles. Is this a way to suggest the symbolic grandeur of these trees, subjecting them to the promise of perpetual magnification? Or is it a way, through a geometric filter, to contain the chaos of their wild forms? Might this visual device also play with the boundary between photography and drawing? The trees of Charlotte Bovy, in their black-and-white, contours, and surfaces, occupy an ambiguous space between drawing and photography. Perhaps they echo the rivalry between the two arts in the 19th century, specifically in representing this forest. Fusing the material of the tree with that of the image, the cardboard—a humble wood-derived material—the artist embodies this ‘solastalgia,’ the disquiet of the Anthropocene conceptualized by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht. In the face of inevitable threats and change, might Charlotte Bovy’s trees then offer the ‘solace’ we so deeply long for?”

— Thierry Grillet

“Umbrella pines under threat, a forest buried in snow, the ghost of shipwrecked souls… Disappearance, whether past, present, or imminent, lies at the heart of Charlotte Bovy’s black-and-white images. They speak only of memory and forgetting, of people and places. From the Pincio hill to Death Valley, from the beaches of Sesimbra to the peaks of the Pyrenees, they descend and ascend the slopes of memory, guardians of an ancient and endless story, whose pieces, reassembled by hand or machine, stitch together a new narrative in delay. Hours and angles change, but the emotion remains in these faceless portraits, always in bands or pairs, never alone. The foam of the waves mirrors that of the days, and surely, the trees will outlive us. Thus Charlotte Bovy fragments the landscape—a recurring character—set before her open eyes where others have closed theirs. These parts of an immutable whole console us for a great loss.”

— Virginie Huet