Chloé Bocquet

1993, Senlis, France
Visual artist—painting, drawing, printmaking

“Dreamlike, recomposed, hollowed-out architectures: Chloé Bocquet’s constructions are first isolated from their original context—the artist retains only their most striking features—then etched into a copper or zinc plate. The gables remain, solitary and majestic, while people and the city’s surroundings vanish from the landscape. Everything is reduced to abstraction, simplification, and geometry. The process is technical and mathematical—one must work with the empty and filled spaces; the passage through the press transforms the line into a hollow, and the hollow into a line. Through the lines she weaves—lines that intersect under the gouge or the point—Chloé Bocquet appropriates outdoor and public spaces: the facades of houses we consider entirely our own but see only when we are outside, and the interiors we inhabit to the point of forgetting them, unless an external force reminds us of their appearance. (…)

In the imprints of landscapes that Chloé Bocquet composes, there is a calm and voluptuous celebration—not only of forms and their contours but also of the textures that fill them, which the artist delights in reproducing through a multitude of striations that reveal the pleasure of the act itself.

Foliage resembling mashrabiya screens fills a garden otherwise composed of vertical hatching or delicate curlicues. A single stroke in a white pool is enough to suggest the pond. It’s all about lines and contours. The daughter of the potter Dibutades was—so the story goes—the first to use this technique to capture the silhouette of her lover as he was about to leave for war, as Pliny the Elder recounted in his *Natural History*. The outline traced on the wall with charcoal encircles that of the beloved, imprisoning his memory rather than his exact image. Chloé Bocquet’s images, however, thwart any sense of nostalgia: the outline delineates a space—of waiting—in which one can imagine and reconstruct at will what actually was, and give it a second life on paper.
There is indeed magic in Chloé Bocquet’s engravings. An invisible bond through which she ties her fate—and that of her drawings—to the spaces of waiting within the world and beyond it. If further proof were needed to support Vasari’s theory that drawing is the father of the three arts (painting, sculpture, and, above all, architecture, which is composed of the two), it is to be found here.
“The world’s drawings give rise to those of Chloé Bocquet, who lets the lines flow relentlessly, from the outside to the inside, and vice versa. The loop—and the line that traces it—are infinite.” (excerpt)
Horya Makhlouf, art critic, author, art historian, and co-founder of Jeunes critiques d’art.

Chloé Bocquet completed a five-year program at the Beaux-Arts in Le Mans from 2012 to 2017. During her studies, she spent time at the Atelier Moret (Paris) and in the graphic arts department at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig (Germany). Since 2017, Chloé Bocquet’s work has been represented by Eames Fine Art in London. She has exhibited at venues including La plus petite galerie du monde (ou presque) (Roubaix), the Woolwich Print Fair (London), and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (Paris).
In 2020, she was awarded the La Colombière residency by the Fondation Marquise de Narros (Gennes-Val-de-Loire, France). She currently lives and works in Roubaix.

Portrait of the artist Chloé Bocquet in her studio

Prize

Collection

EDITION

Education

Vis-à-Vis Monotypes
Color Is an Image (Landscape)

Also available for purchase on the website.