Tiffany Bouelle - Vibrant Vestiges - Château de Malleret

Opening on Tuesday, May 19: 4 PM - 8 PM
Exhibition from Tuesday, May 19 to Sunday, June 21
Open Tuesday to Sunday 2 PM - 6 PM

Château de Malleret
470 chemin de Malleret - 33290 Le Pian Médoc

For the third consecutive year, Château de Malleret hosts a contemporary art exhibition curated by Yoyo Maeght, who internationally supports emerging artists.

Artist Tiffany Bouelle takes over the cellars of this historic estate. Trained at the École Supérieure d'Arts Appliqués Duperré, Tiffany Bouelle develops a multidisciplinary practice nurtured by her dual French and Japanese culture.

Between painting, drawing, and performance, her work is based on a rigorous economy of gesture: repetition, erasure, inscription. Her work questions the body, memory, and the living with an almost unsettling sincerity. Her works do not seek to produce images, but to create spaces of perception where time slows down and where what remains, despite loss and erasure, can finally be felt.

Tiffany Bouelle

Art as a Theatre of Life

Tiffany Bouelle forces me to reconsider two questions I thought I had long settled: What is a work of art? Is the artist part of their work?

These questions are readily asked about the classics. We think of Rembrandt inviting himself into his canvases, of Frida Kahlo whose life submerges every painting, of Joseph Beuys who made self-narration a raw material. But I no longer thought I had to formulate these questions so clearly in the face of contemporary creation. Yet, Tiffany Bouelle subtly reopens the debate, without even needing to say a word.

Tiffany Bouelle has always shared the daily life of her pictorial practice with external observers. For her, gesture is not the hidden underside of the work: it is its very substance. Her performances, in galleries, museums, architectural spaces, historical monuments, are not an added soul grafted onto the painting, nor a communication event. They are the natural extension of a work that is seeking itself, that assumes to seek itself in public and to be born before our eyes. This visual as well as mental experience then exerts a triple attraction on us, the spectators: the mystery of creation, the incredible precision of the gesture and – fortunately, otherwise everything else would be mere staging – the magic of the works themselves.

This way of inhabiting her practice is something extremely rare and precious. In an environment where performance has too often become a posture, a format calibrated for institutions, Tiffany restores its primary function: an irrevocable act, an engagement with material, a discipline of doing.

To freely appreciate her work, I trained myself to look at her creations by completely abstracting from the traces, memories, and recollections of the performances I had seen. The exercise is more difficult than it seems. Is this precisely what makes her work so unique? Perhaps this is where the strength of her work lies, in this gentle impossibility of separating what has been experienced from what is shown.

Tiffany transforms her studio into a constantly evolving space. Far beyond a simple workspace conducive to intimacy with the artwork, she makes it a living stage where the dialogue between herself and her creation unfolds endlessly. A small theatre that reminds me of Jacques Prévert's poetry in Les Enfants du Paradis and which brings back, perhaps less famously, the memory of the skits presented by the late David Rochline, when he escaped from the "Malakoff gang," composed of Annette Messager, Christian Boltanski, and Sophie Calle, among others.

I love this way of combining gravity and enchantment, this way of evoking the most accurate emotions from almost infinitesimal gestures; I love this economy of means capable of tilting everyday life towards the strange. Tiffany Bouelle awakens a sense of astonishment and wonder that I thought I had lost with Georges Méliès and his surreal pantomimes.

The artist surprises us because she does not allow herself to be confined to a calibrated and conventional artistic approach. She escapes and settles into no definitive form. Even more precious, there is in her practice an element of amusement, a word that one almost hesitates to pronounce today when speaking of art. Tiffany, however, demonstrates with each canvas, each gesture, that elegance is a form of rigor, perhaps even one of the most demanding, because it tolerates neither approximation nor ease.

Beneath this apparent lightness, even simplicity, Tiffany Bouelle's work compels us to a deep reflection on the adventure of art in all its expressions. Then, without order or hierarchy, calligraphy, abstraction, figuration, performance, fresco, decor… intersect. And what if all this were simply a reflection on the unexpected forms that can arise from the encounter of cultures as distant as Japan and France?

Trained at the École supérieure d'arts appliqués Duperré, in Paris, in the Fashion and Environment section, Tiffany could have been swallowed up by the overly polished aesthetic of the Parisian scene, blending in until she dissolved. She chose another path: that of a slow attention to fragile forms, to repeated gestures, to buried memories.

The broad brushstrokes that have, from the beginning, composed Tiffany's works immediately made me think, even before I knew she was Franco-Japanese, of the wonderful gardens of Kyoto that I was lucky enough to discover in my childhood, thanks to my grandfather. This coincidence was no coincidence. Tiffany learned traditional calligraphy from a very young age from her grandfather, a master in this art. Two grandfathers, two gardens, two memories. There is an invisible thread that links us and that now runs through her paintings, giving her gestures their silent resonance, a legacy transmitted before words.

Tiffany's early works seem driven by a desire to leave a mark. But what kind would it be? Is it the imprint of a society, of a moment of civilization captured in its momentum or its fragility? Or rather a more intimate memory, oscillating between an almost joyful lightness and the weight of a darker memory, that of an atomic destruction that durably marked the 20th century.

With the series The Postpartum Forest, another territory is revealed. Figurative painting then becomes a space where the intimate becomes political. Gradually, the work shifts and reflects other concerns – collective and environmental memory, the disappearance of insects, mental landscapes, memory wounds, or erased ecosystems – fortunately without losing any of that intimate precision that is the signature of her work.

The recent works, gathered under the title Flowers are Born in the Ruins, confront us with a subject of extreme violence. Tiffany paints rubble, tangled calcined beams, piles of debris. The triptych Minab, over four meters long, displays this vision with an almost unbearable magnitude, recalling the recent bombing of a girls' school. And yet, in this chaos, a flower is reborn. While almost the entire surface of the work evokes desolation, a single tiny flower offers – at least for me – this extraordinary hope that everything can be reborn from ashes. This inversion of scale, this domination of disaster by delicacy, constitutes one of the most powerful political gestures in contemporary painting.

Nothing is ever fixed with Tiffany, everything remains in suspense. The works carry their own vacillation. Each proposition contains, within itself, its own contradiction. A hypothesis arises, immediately followed by its opposite, in a seesaw game that refuses any definitive conclusion. It is undoubtedly there that the strength of her work lies. The works do not impose anything, they open up a space for thought, shift certainties, and invite us to accept this fertile discomfort where multiple readings coexist. It is in this unstable, almost vibrant space, that the gaze is activated and the work continues to live.

Especially for the exhibition I am presenting at Château de Malleret, Tiffany Bouelle is creating two monumental works, composed on site, in public, in an instinctive choreography that only she knows the secret of. This demonstrates a rare audacity, a seizing of the artist's status who dares to dive into the unknown. Here, no repentance is possible; the gesture is affirmed, irreversible, it is the finally visible extension of a creative process long thought out over the years.

The exhibition also brings together more intimate works: gansai watercolor papers, ballpoint pen drawings, and the astonishing What's in my bag, where painting becomes sculpted relief. This plurality of formats, this incessant circulation between the monumental and the minuscule, between painting, drawing, and object, is not eclecticism. It is a coherent economy of vision, where a simple flower painted on fragile paper can convey the same message as a four-meter triptych.

This is what Tiffany and I wanted to highlight in this exhibition titled Vibrant Remains. This gesture that persists, this way of bringing forth life where everything seems to have disappeared, this audacity to paint what resists, this invitation to slow down and feel what remains when everything seems threatened.

Tiffany Bouelle does not seek to convince. She observes and analyzes our era with unsettling sincerity. She guides us to the threshold of two questions that few artists dare to ask: What will we choose to preserve? What are we prepared to see?

Yoyo Maeght, May 2026

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