Discover the contemporary work of Cécile Récapé

Influenced in my technique by the Italian painter Valerio Adami, I have always worked with acrylic because it offers me invaluable drying speed: my canvases contain three or even four layers of the same shade superimposed, the last, the ultimate and definitive being thus saturated to its peak in order to obtain maximum intensity, the secret of its light. Impatient by nature, I often even use a hairdryer between coats...

One of the pleasures painting brings me is that moment when the feeling of completion sets in, the inner certainty that the canvas is finally finished...

Yet at the same time, it's difficult to accept leaving a space where you've lost yourself for a moment...

The black outline helps me get through this stage, it surrounds each color, delineating it with certainty and reassures her in a unique space for each one.

At that moment, there is something magical for me in the appearance of this black line that gives life to the shapes, makes them exist and detaches them from each other on the canvas.

Each color is prepared or rather meditated upon, a vague reminiscence of a memory or a reflection of an emotion, a distillation of my memory.

Colored grays are my favorite palettes.

The drawings always remain prior to In terms of color, they are inspired by photographs taken by artists or myself. I can also use my daughter as a model.

One of the main subjects of my painting remains, since my first canvas painted in January 2003, the bathers of the 1930s.

Léon Spilliaert's melancholic bather was the first starting point...

Bathers, pure silhouettes of flappers dressed in a simple swimsuit, motionless, allegories of waiting, have always given me... an inexplicable fascination.

For over ten years, these silhouettes have paraded through my mind... from fashion shots by Jacques-Henri Lartigue to those of Hoyningen-Huene, poses by Lee Miller or shots by Dahl-Wolfe, swimmers by Kenton Nelson... an aesthetic that is always sober and clear, very refined.