LES ÂMES VAGABONDES (2024) Sculpture by Amicie De Bouteiller

Passionate about wood since childhood and nourished by the creative universe of my parents, I began my career by developing products for luxury brands. In 2018, I trained in cabinetmaking at the Boulle school, discovered contemporary marquetry and created my first sculpture. Carried by this momentum, I left everything to devote myself entirely to art.

I have always had a real inclination for complex spaces, corners, nooks, hidden areas and those highlighted, but also for busy spaces, where accumulation reigns supreme. I prefer an English garden a thousand times over a French garden!

It is this predilection for profusion and complexity that dictates the character of my artistic creations today.

To arrive at the shapes that make up my sculptures, I work both on the silhouette of the full shape, but also on the shape of the void between two full shapes.

And then, when a shape comes to life, it is never the same as the one I had imagined. It takes on relief, depth and develops its own roughness.

I am very interested in roughness, irregularity and imperfection.

Like human beings, I believe that it is imperfections that give character: just as an asymmetry on a face gives it relief and originality, my forms are deliberately uneven and imperfect.

The lines are never completely straight, the curves are deliberately not perfect. It is imperfection - a very subjective notion - that catches the eye and makes the work unique.

I draw, cut and assemble my works, like architectural pieces. I find it fascinating to play with shapes, superpositions, crossings, stacking, scale games, perspectives; and thus to create compositions that defy geometry while capturing the essence of strangeness.

It is therefore a subtle play of forms and counter-forms, of hollows and solids, of shadows and lights, of color or wood, like a graphic ballet that is apparently random, but carefully orchestrated. My work is sometimes very thoughtful, sometimes very intuitive and spontaneous, but always guided by this need to give form to an "ordered chaos". I sometimes spend days building and deconstructing a sculpture until I find this "perfect" balance between spontaneity and rigor that will make it beautiful in my eyes.

I create to express what I cannot say otherwise, to tell a story whose words escape me. Each work is an attempt to capture a moment of beauty and freeze it in time to transmit to others this emotion that beauty provides. It is a necessity, a vital impulse that drives me and offers me, for the first time, absolute freedom without any imposed rules, only those that I choose to follow or break.

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : 1984
• Artistic domains: Works by professional artists,
• Groups: Professional Artist Contemporary French Artists

The Artist was highlighted in an article in ArtMajeur Magazine:

Amicie De Bouteiller: The artist who sublimates imperfection and reinvents space