In Céline Marin's work, reality gives way to imagination. Her meticulously executed pencil drawings evoke a surreal world full of humour. The artist constructs her unique iconography by collecting amateur and personal snapshots, postcards, images cut out from magazines, old engravings, illustrated scientific articles and practical guides. Then it's a question of classifying and ordering them according to broad themes, before assembling them. The act of assembling/dismantling and combining/uncombining is reminiscent of Surrealist collages.
In all cases, iconographic research appears to be a way of breaking with the linear reading of history, preferring a diachronic and personal apprehension of it, giving rise to infinite combinations of the past with the present. And in this clash, Céline Marin keeps the images that have an unusual character. Completely disparate things can be brought together by sharing a common space. The result is scenes filled with small characters pinned into an absence of scenery, landscapes or other environments, so that everyone can project their own mental landscape onto them. Similarly, for her double series of drawings La cinquième saison (The Fifth Season), which grew out of an itinerant residency based on European winter rituals, Céline Marin draws inspiration from her own experience of the European winter in 5 different countries. Céline Marin's work is inspired by her observation of a vast sociocultural heterogeneity, and once again plays on the unusual to present a continuing collection of bizarre tribes.
Céline Marin (°1986) is a French artist who lives and works in Nice. After obtaining her Diplôme National d'Art at the Villa Arson in Nice and her Diplôme National Supérieur d'Expression Plastique (master's degree) at the École Supérieure d'Arts d'Aix-en-Provence, Céline Marin joined the post-graduate programme at the Pavillon Bosio in Monaco. This enabled her to develop a unique practice based on the collection of images, both iconographic and anecdotal, from different eras and relating to cultures that are nonetheless in complete opposition. This post-graduate diploma was the starting point for the professionalisation of her practice, with a solo exhibition, Les joies du bain ou comment traverser un espace d'eau considérable avec aisance, and the development of partner projects, notably with the Théâtre de la Criée in the production of two backdrops as part of the Mauvais Genre festival in Marseille. Since then, the artist has taught at the École Municipale d'Arts Plastiques de la ville de Menton, and has held numerous residencies and solo and group exhibitions at art centres, galleries and museums in France and abroad. In May 2021, the commune of Roure entrusted her with the creation of a cultural project. Since then, the artist has been curating a series of summer exhibitions at the Notre-Dame-des-Grâces chapel under the name Une chapelle Un artiste.