Galerie Christian Collin

A bench, a silhouette with a hat, a checkerboard, stairs ...
Symbolic and narrative, the patterns created by Hélène Bautista evolve in a strange temporality. They mysteriously pop up in a corner of the plate, disappear and come back. They tell a story with a mysterious intrigue ...

Born in Rodez, Hélène teaches French in Paris. Her love for literature led her to edition and prints. Through the illustrations of Félix Vallotton, Gustave Doré, Frans Masereel, she discovered the art of engraving, which she has been practicing for almost ten years, in intaglio and linoleum.

Originally from Japan, Atsuko has settled down in Paris since 1995. She creates sensitive and poetics etchings and collages in colors. She has exhibited in galleries since 1996, in Japan, Europe and United States. Her work has been noticed by the French publishing houses J'ai lu, Syros, L’École des loisirs and by the Feminine press. Some of her etchings were printed on limited series clothes in le Bon Marché and Isabel Marant. 

photo © Lyndie Dourthe

« My interest lies in the power to evoke disquieting and elusive moments with subtle nuances of hope- in the form of light  that the richness and halftones of the mezzotint can uncover. [...] I am an explorer of twilight zones and ambiguous spaces. Much of my recent work explores ambivalence - suspended - the struggle with insight and doubt , hesitation  and commitment – the difficulty of existence. Moments of isolation and dislocation, stillness and silence  where introspection and alienation are consciously engaged and interrogated. People waiting  in darkness caught between expectation and anxiety is the most haunting imagery. » Cleo Wilkinson.

Born in Melbourne, Cleo Wilkinson is a painter, sculptor, photographer and printmaker specialized  in the mezzotint print technique. Graduated from Elam Art School (Auckland University, New Zealand), she has continued studies with further workshops in Oxford, New-York and Barcelona. A recipient of over 75 major international and national print awards her work is also included in over 90 internationally significant major collections, galleries and museums world wide including the  Victoria  and Albert Museum (London) and Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts (Tokyo), Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts (Russia) and exhibited at the National Museum of China in Beijing .

Hélène Rivière lives and works in Grenoble.
She graduated with honours from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris.
Printmaking is a medium in its own right for this artist, who has chosen to innovate and experiment outside traditional techniques. Her works could be defined first and foremost as inks on paper. It's not the multiple that interests her, but being able to combine colour with the possibilities of printing. The technique she calls "card block print" consists of a cardboard matrix that is cut into several parts, which are then inked and printed using a press in several passes of different colours. Her work is inspired by her daily life and her escapades in the mountains around Grenoble.

Corinne Lepeytre started her professional career in management. Then in 2010, she stopped this activity and devoted herself to graphic arts and pictorial matter (restoration of paintings, painting according to ancient techniques, gilding with leaf, elaboration of icons) and discovered engraving. Between 2012 and 2020, she learns engraving with Francis Capdeboscq. She participes in numerous events and collective exhibitions of printmaking. She sometimes organizes them.

For Corinne, the urban landscape is her favourite subject, particularly that of Paris where she has her roots. Thanks to her great mastery of aquatint, she takes a curious and erudite look at the city; she sometimes reveals the hidden sides and above all the mysterious or enigmatic soul of the place. Her creations are echoes of the images of yesteryear. With Corinne as our guide, from the detailed to the wide shot, in the bright light of day or in the half-light of night, we discover the strata of history, the imprints and traces left on the walls of the city. She says that she owes her taste for engraving to the prints of Piranesi, Canaletto and Desmazières. 

Corinne practices aquatint engraving on zinc or copper. Most of her prints are monochrome, in black ink on rag paper and with lost edges. She works in series (The roofs of Paris, the Parisian passages, the windows on Paris...). 

The beauty of nature that we find both near and far and the changes happening to it over time feature in Marianne Nix's work. She combines digital tools with traditional printmaking techniques such as etching, aquatint, chine collé and lithographic paper transfer. 

Marianne Nix graduated in fashion design, and studied digital media at MA level. She worked as a Documentary film director where she learnt more about light and shade. She was brought up in the UK and Netherlands and spent three years in Japan as the only non native student studying part time at Japanese art school. Focussing entirely on her art since 2003 she is now working from her London studio producing layered and multimedia works that have sold internationally.

photo © Louis Delbarre, Som Prabh

Pablo Flaiszman is born in Argentina in Buenos Aires. He began to educated himself on painting and drawing with Luisa Reisner. Thanks to her he met Alfredo de Vincenzo in 1997 who teach him the way to engrave. He quickly chose to exploit the techniques of etching and aquatint.  The first allows him to " to find again the freedom of the line that he likes in the drawing and, the second, to play with the infinite nuances and values of the painter's palette, here translated in black and white". (1)

In 2000, Pablo Flaiszman move to Paris to follow his artistic adventure. He met the Danish artiste Bo Halbirk with whom he improved his aquatint technique. To compose his works, he relies on old or contemporary family photographs in black and white. He turns these scenes of everyday life into photomontages. This work serves as a basis to compose his engraving but other changes can still occur because it does not faithfully transfer on the plate the elements of the photomontage. After this step, he begins the work of aquatint, in which he excels and where he shows a wide variety of blacks "alternately light, deep, hard or soft, more or less grayish" (2) and contrasting with white. His work is a subtle balance of black and white, each revealing the other. By using only these two tones, Pablo's world appears disturbing and mysterious and makes the viewer wonder.

(1) Laurence Paton, « L’inquiétante étrangeté des gravures de Pablo Flaiszman » dans Arts et Métiers du Livre, n°328, septembre-octobre 2018.

(2) Béatrice Vingtrinier, Revue ACTUEL, l’estampe contemporaine n°19 / 2020

Lisa Takahashi was born in London and studied Fine Art at Bath School of Art and Design and Middlesex University. Her brightly colour linocut prints combine influences from both the Japanese and British aspects of her heritage. She uses a multi-block method and utilises the transparency of selected pigments to create interesting mixes as they are layered upon the page. Cycling imagery is a favourite subject matter; for the artist the interdependence of racing road cyclists to help build collective speed is emblematic of the best of humanity. Added to this is a celebration of speed, colour and shape, that follows in the tradition of the Futurists and Grosvenor School printmakers of the 20th century before her.

Lisa Takahashi has exhibited extensively within the UK including at the Royal Academy of Arts, the New English Art Club, The Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. Christian. We're delighted to present some of her work for the first time in France. 

Anna Jeretic, French-American, painter-engraver-calligrapher, has been engraving for 30 years. Her favourite subjects are animals and plants. Since 2004, she has been developing her technique of aquatint with sugar and rolling with a deep bite. The colour print is made by means of several superimposed plates. The light then gradually appears. Through her various artistic expressions Anna Jeretic is committed to the sanctification of nature, its most abstract and humble forms. She wishes to give a voice to nature.

Her work has been shown in France, the USA, Italy and Japan. Her last exhibitions took place at the Fontainebleau biosphere (October 2022) and at the Mairie du 6e in Paris (March 2022), "Le Jardin sauvage".

Anna Jerectic is also a printmaking teacher at the Comairas Academy in Fontainebleau for almost 20 years, and welcomes young artists involved in environmental issues to her workshops in Chartrettes (Seine-et-Marne).

Baptiste Fompeyrine was born in 1989. He studied in the photo-video class of the Arts Décoratifs de Paris, then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in painting, engraving and lithography as well as in the landscape painting section of the Hong-ik University in Seoul. 

A former resident of the Casa de Velasquez, his works are part of the collections of the Bullukian Foundation in Lyon, the art library of the Paul Dini Museum, the Il Bisonte Foundation and the Piero Ciampi Foundation in Florence, the Institut de France in Madrid, the Musée de Saint Maur, the Bibliothèque de l'Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Bibliothèque nationale.

Laurent Letourmy's work is both contemplative and constructed: contemplative because it's based on the observation and empathy of a visible and invisible universe and constructed around a perception of the living imbalance between light and shadow.

The artist first trained his eye with Martial Raysse, before turning to architecture, which he then taught at the Paris-Malaquais school for nearly seven years. His missions in Canada and Egypt had a profound effect on him and shaped his taste for the representation of landscape.  

Laurent Letourmy creates engravings on linoleum evoking in a synthetic and poetic way the elements that make up nature: animals, singular sites, details... Almost exclusively in black and white and in square format, these very pure visions seem to reflect the artist's desire to draw the images towards signs and symbols with a sometimes playful approach, notably in the Bestiary set.

Sylvie Abélanet studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré in Paris from 1979 to 1985. As painter-engraver and mosaicist, she founded the Atelier d'Arts Plastiques, in 1994, named after Pierre Soulages and which she has run ever since. After many years spent in collective printmaking workshops, she set up the Désir d'encre workshop in Charenton in 2008. 

As a painter-engraver, Sylvie Abélanet is equally interested in experimenting with etching and intaglio techniques, using aquatint and soft-ground etching. Inspired by literature and poetry, her work draws up a strange cartography of aquatic elements, plants and animals. She plays with ruptures and inversions of scale that have the effect of disturbing the viewer, tipping a flower or a character out of its figurative reality. Sylvie Abélanet is deeply in tune with medieval iconography when she interprets the biblical scene of Paradise or the Persian poem, the Song of Birds, especially when it is enriched by the precise observation of nature.

Photographic credit : Jean-François Deroubaix