Les yeux libres, 2022
Vidya Gastaldon’s work questions the links between artistic practices, handicraft, ornamental art, and what was once considered “women’s work”. After working with wool – not to make tapestries but for large installations, like eyes hanging by threads or other multicoloured strings suspended from the ceiling – she has begun using other people’s framed amateur paintings as her new medium. She offers them a second life and a new meaning by means of boosting and transforming them. By bringing these second-hand objects into a gallery, she questions the status of painting, of the author, and of art itself.
(Extract from the text written by Claude-Hubert Tatot)
© Thomas Maisonnasse
© Isabelle Meister (portrait)
This French-Swiss artist was born in Besançon in 1974, and now lives and works between Geneva and the Ain region, on a farm in Hauteville-Lompnes. Through her drawings, paintings and sculptures, the artist explores an aesthetic linked to “states of consciousness”, where notions of pleasure and experience are imbued with new strength. “Vidya Gastaldon’s drawings appear as the fruit of hallucinations. Her landscapes allow us to grasp movement from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, to perceive a macrocosm and the teeming life of its cellular constitution. The world seen through her drawings – but also her sculptures and films – is made up of living matter in constant mutation”, explained curator Fabrice Stroun during the Biolovarama exhibition at MAMCO Geneva in 2005. In addition to her numerous solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, she co-directed the Geneva art space Zabriskie Point between 2010 and 2015, and currently teaches in the Representation programme at HEAD Geneva. She also practices and teaches Kashmirian yoga and is particularly interested in the sacred texts of India.
Instagram @vidyagastaldon
Window display: courtesy of Confédération Centre throught the bureau CBRE (contact ines.debavier@cbre.com to rent)
Vidya Gastaldon
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