Caroline Rivalan

I work on mise en abyme of images produced in microcosms (dioramas) or light installation devices. The reference to the Grotesques ‘figures without thickness nor weight, mixture of rigor and inconstancy which sends us back to an extravagant reverie’ of André Chastel, considered since always as a sub-genre ‘preferring the monsters to the normal images’ is a constant in my inspirations. The reference to myth and the hedonistic aspect of nature crossed with the figure of madness allows me to cross gravity and lightness in the representation itself. Art must always be a bit scary and a bit funny’ Jean Dubuffet

Caroline Rivalan

A profusion of pieces: cut-outs, flashing dioramas, installations, activated volumes. Specialized in stage costume, Caroline Rivalan was interested in theater and cinema before obtaining her DNSEP at the Villa Arson. She then began to question the symbolic value of the decor and developed her reflection around it in the exhibition space. Faithful to the “theater and its double” of A. Artaud she deconstructs his theater. From the disjointed decor, from the drawn l, the scenes and the characters, become in their turn decorations. The theater is always present. A reinvented theater, a dreamed theater. As in Henri Michaux’s “aerial ideograms” where the tasks reappropriate the space in a half-stated literary form, in Caroline Rivalan’s work the association of figures creates the space. The images accumulate, associating with each other like an alphabet. Influenced by Surrealism as well as by Nadja’s peregrinations in the streets of Paris, it is precisely this dreamlike shift that Caroline Rivalan seeks. The I is the one that allows him to link through his reveries bodies and settings. Reproducing the gestures of the heroines of Greek Mythology, (Ariadne unrolling her l, Penelope weaving, unweaving and reweaving, etc.) the artist deploys in space accumulations, installations. She draws her inspiration from the stuffy world of 19th century bourgeois salons where objects, paintings and motifs abound. The hangings, the draperies, the tapestries, the curiosities, the mirrors…as on “The wall” of André Breton where they trace the history of Surrealism by the collections, the encounters also incongruous of these beautiful images as ” (…) the fortuitous meeting on a table of dissection of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

Charles Berger, November 2019

Caroline Rivalan

Biography

Lives and works in Nice