“Rainbo Conversation”

Béatrice Cussol

January 12 — February 18, 2012

French artist Bétrice CUSSOL has had solo exhibitions in many prestigious venues, including the Centre d'Art, Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Galerie Beaubourg, Venice; Galerie Françoise Vigna, Nice; Galerie Rachlin-Lemarié, Paris; and Galerie Porte Avion, Marseille. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Beaux-arts de Toulouse; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tourcoing; Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon; Bawag Foundation, Vienna; Envoy Gallery, New York; and La Criée, Rennes. She also participated in the Venice Biennale in 2003 and was a featured artist in Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin. Cussol's work comprises mixed-medium collages and drawings in watercolor and ink on paper or on wall surfaces.

In an unpublished text, French critic Elisabeth Lebovici observes: "Feminine figures are the vehicles of her expression. In total autonomy and self-absorption, they fill and fulfill her world. Her drawings, watercolors and murals use the white grounds as a space, enabling her figures to move and scenes to occur, in the sudden coalescence of fluid zones of color and lines. Her compositions are sufficiently undetermined to produce narration through association or analogy, without any pre-established or stereotypical meaning, reconstructing bodies perceived from the inside or seen from their delineation. They are making the beholder the subject of their visions, not only of somebody else's (i.e., the artist's) fantasies."