Caroline Lopez — Un instant avec vous

At the Luxembourg, empty chairs are the most inhabited.

The Artist

Caroline Lopez lives between Paris and the Alabaster Coast. An interior architect by training, a poet by nature. She deconstructs, recomposes, returns to the essential — in pencil, ink, and watercolour — ever since looking became, for her, a form of writing. From the veiled to the unveiled, meaning is accessible to those who take the time. Since 2013, she exhibits, observes, writes about the ordinary theatre of the world — the roles played, time passing, people who walk by not knowing they are being watched.

The Series

It all began with bodies. People sitting in the Jardin du Luxembourg on a weekday morning, under a still oblique light. Caroline observes them, captures them freehand, sets them down on paper in flat washes of navy blue, slate grey, pale mauve. Two silhouettes facing each other — Échanger. Two backs bent over a book — Lire. Two old figures shoulder to shoulder, a cane resting in one hand — Se reposer. Portraits without faces. Presences. The raw material of a life unfolding in the open air, between the iron gates and the chestnut trees.

Then, slowly, the bodies disappear. The chair remains. Empty, but not empty — charged with what has just happened, or with what has not yet arrived.

"At the Luxembourg, I understood that empty chairs are the most inhabited. They hold everything — the warmth, the waiting, the promise of returning."

She begins to note the time: 9h16, 9h17, 10h51, 10h54, 10h55, 10h56. A minute apart, sometimes less. The light has shifted. The shadow has moved across the sand — blood red, mauve, indigo, burnt gold. The chair becomes a sundial. The series asks its question, soft and insistent: Where are you?

The freehand gesture says what the laid brush cannot: the outlines breathe, the shadows overflow slightly, nothing is ruled. Everything is seized in the moment, like handwriting. Forms appear in negative, cut from colour by the precision of the gesture alone, almost immaterial. It is the void that defines them. It is absence that speaks. And then comes orientation — the degrees of a compass, north, south, east, west — as though, after time, it was space that needed to be crossed. The Luxembourg is no longer a garden. It is an interior territory. A cartography of what one seeks when sitting alone in the sun, in a city that does not wait.

Works

Watercolour on paper — 30 × 30 cm — €180 each (framing option, +€20)

Works available at Art Quam Anima, 28 rue du Dragon, Paris 6e.

Contact

For enquiries: 📩 contact@artquamanima.com