Artistic Career
Christelle Montus lives and works in Geneva. After studying hospitality management at l'Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne, she turned her passion into an art. She has developed from the beginning an abstract plastic art. Her large oils on canvas, her felt pen drawings, her installations, her collages, her sprinklings, express a quest for meaning. Tombé du ciel, Soleil Noir, Cousu de fil...noir, Firmament, Abyme, Cyclothymie, Suite de Convergence, Série Noire, Rencontre, On prend l'métro, Constellation are essays about the future. In contemporary art, thought and message play a decisive role. Her reflections cannot be separated from her works, they come through clearly from the conception and application of her techniques and methods, with a force implicit in the physical realizations.
Inspired since childhood by her vision of the starry night sky, Christelle Montus has never stopped dreaming of how she could represent artistically the expanding universe. She has transformed these cosmic visions into pictorial form in her canvases. At the suggestion of Joseph Farine, artistic director of the Geneva-based Andata.Ritorno Workshop for contemporary art, she created in situ a crowning ephemeral work as a culmination of her search. To bring her vision of the night sky into reality, she used pigments and spangles. The black background represented the infinite depths of the universe. The galaxies, stars, and planets shone in this brilliant décor, symbolized by a showering of multicolored pigments and spangles.
Once more, through an ephemeral work painted in situ, Christelle Montus projected her artistic vision of the impact of the solar light as it shines through the Andata.Ritorno gallery at noon during the winter solstice. This painting has been a negative, black light being shown on white walls. In this oxymoronic Black Sun were simultaneously combined the flare of a bright sun and the attraction of a black hole.
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And again at Andata.Ritorno, Christelle Montus proceeded to dress the central pillar of the gallery within its own space. This ephemeral work has unfolded a veil between the floor and the ceiling, black threads converging towards the base of the pillar. This symbolic web seemed to focus the innumerable multitude of cosmic rays from the distant stellar spaces onto the center of the world. Christelle Montus became the seamstress who has draped the pillar with its heavenly fleece.
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As the final arrow in her quiver, Christelle Montus has created collages on wood using Paris subway tickets, with each panel representing a different station. Fascinated by the myth of the Paris Metro, she has over the years collected its tickets. Through the years, the colors have changed, most recently from yellow to green and then from purple to white. Diving into the Metro, with its entrances, its corridors, the platforms, the transfers, is to immerse oneself in a subterranean world full of striking sensations and images. On black painted one square meter panels, using the tickets she has created abstract figures, allegorically associated with particular stations. Each panel bears an evocative name – Concorde, Louvre, Etoile, Nation, Bastille… This work has been exhibited at the Belfry of the Paris First Arrondissement City Hall.
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Christelle Montus transforms her work into an ongoing search, giving herself the means to develop a repertory in keeping with her visions, her expectations, and her own requirements.
