Justine Bougerol

Justine Bougerol, a visual artist, tells stories of spaces and memories through installations conceived in situ around the leitmotif of the house of birth, in which the lived experience is confronted with the unconscious, dreams mingle with reality, and the invisible with the visible. Memory is a recurring theme that the artist treats through the elaboration of interior and dreamlike landscapes. Nostalgia coexists with absurdity and strangeness, typical of the places of our memories transformed by the subjectivity of each one. The material (water, earth, fire, vegetation) plays a major role in the elaboration of these spaces, giving substance to the spectator's contemplation. The boundaries between inside and outside, empty space and full space, closed space and space open to the world, are always very fine in order to let the spectator's imagination escape to a fantasized elsewhere, highlighted by Justine Bougerol.

The characteristic of her installations is to question and manipulate the real and familiar space, the one Georges Perec talks about in his Espèces d'espaces. Her work consists of taking over a place that has been made available in situ, playing with the codes for reading architectural space, in order to insert a space of a different nature: the Other space. While the artist's point of departure is always located in what constitutes our own reality, Justine Bougerol infuses the exhibition space with an unresolved ambiguity, leading the viewer to re-interrogate his or her usual perceptions in order to linger on a new narrative, through the discovery of a space seized by the imagination.

The artist places the viewer in front of devices with a single point of view. The viewer's eye discovers a plural space composed of successive strata thought as a fiction. The viewer's gaze crosses as many thresholds detaching it from the here and now to tip over into an unreachable yonder, for which everyone experiences a spatial nostalgia. Justine Bougerol transforms the space into a frontal scene, where a process of fragmentation, optical illusion and manipulation of perspectives is played out in such a way as to disorientate our spatial and temporal reference points. This shift appears in particular thanks to the loss of scale and the use of miniature to evoke the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The notions of depth, interval, echo and mise en abîme are also very present in his work.