Indoor Moments
Margaux Rebourcet has a keen eye for simple beauty and visual metaphors. The French artist, who mostly works in gouache and watercolors, has most recently translated this talent to canvas and paper throughout France’s recent Covid-19 lockdown. With careful attention to everyday interactions between people and objects, and an appreciation for the quietly beautiful, Rebourcet creates still lives and portraits which are at once gentle and animated. Each piece elevates the details of the mundane to the grand scale of new landscapes we wouldn’t mind stepping into. Needless to say, if this is how Rebourcet reimagines life indoors, we can’t wait to see what the artist is capable of once the world unlocks its doors again.
Part One: Who is Margaux Rebourcet?
Question #1: Who are you as an artist?
“I am an artist from France. I paint visual haikus of a casual life, mine and yours.
I express what I experience and feel. I illustrate trends that I witness in our social behaviors.”
Question #2: What has led you to this point in your life?
“I had always painted since early childhood, but it stopped when I started to focus on education and my marketing job.
I felt the need to reconnect with painting as a way of expressing my feelings and those of people around me. I quit my job, traveled, did introspection work and reconnected with my family’s identity. All this converged in me painting again, happily and with a fresh energy. I dived into drawing and painting. I experimented and I found something that I consider my style, my own expression.”
Question #3: What motivates you to create?
“I need to express things and myself – to practice to better represent what I have in mind, to better my technique to reach excellence and beauty – to experiment with beauty – to share what I have observed, absorbed and analyzed. It is a sort of maieutic.”
Part Two: Ordinary Beauty
What is your artistic practice?
I paint visual haikus of a casual life, mine and yours, before, during and after quarantine. My themes are both portraits inspired by the selfie culture and still lives of banal objects. I represent instants of life: our selfies and self display mechanisms and the objects surrounding us. All of that constituting a beauty in itself.
2020
Gouache & watercolor
22,5 x 18 cm
8,9 x 7,1 in
2020
Gouache & watercolors
19 x 17,7 cm
7 1/2 x 7 in
This painting was created as France entered quarantine. I wanted to represent what would be the main objects surrounding us for this new time.
It was published March 30, 2020 in the New York Times in the article “The Quarantine Diaries” by Amelia Nierenberg.
2020
Gouache & watercolor
15,5 x 17,5 c
6,10 x 6,9 in
How rumors created impulse purchases and propelled few goods as must haves for a quarantine “réussie” – toilet paper and flour.
“Réussi” is a link to the famous Sarkozy punchline “Si à 50 ans on a pas une Rolex, c’est qu’on a râté sa vie”, which means that if by your 50’s your are not a happy owner of a Rolex watch, you basically failed in life. So to have a fulfilled quarantine, you just need to have at home, loads of toilet paper and wheat flour.
Gouache & watercolor
25,4 x 18 cm
10 x 7 in
Boredom and contemplation.
Gouache and watercolor
22 x 17 cm
8,6 x 6,7 in
Illustration of my life in a jar and my life as a jar, at the beginning of quarantine, between acceptance and denial. You understand that you will stay quarantined in a small apartment for weeks, you want to go out and to just get out this pandemic situation. But you can’t, you accept and make the best of it!
Where/ How can Vacant Museum viewers see more of your work and where can they purchase it?
You can follow my work on Instagram @margaux_reb.
For purchase, they currently happen via Instagram as well.