Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont Paints the Ghosts Inside Us

In mid-September, SLEEK met with French artist Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont in her Berlin studio.

Breil-Dupont’s paintings are striking – instantly recognisable. Her subjects are reminiscent of Jan van Eyck with a combination of an otherworldly character, their eyes following you as you walk across the large canvas.

The air and light inside the studio is gentle, which feels like a funny contradiction to the boldness on her canvas. She welcomes me in and spritzes me swiftly with a water spray. “You can only find this particular brand in France. All my friends ask me to bring one back for them when I travel to Paris. They’re obsessed with it,” explains Breil-Dupont. The spray is a refreshing mix of tea tree and other herbs – it wakes me and as the scent settles, we sit and begin our conversations about truth, relationships, colour and her fascination for the “ghosts” inside us.

You share a close relationship with the subjects in your work. What drew you to express this visually in the first place?

Each painting comes from an intimate relationship, even if it was a short encounter. I paint mostly my friends and the people with whom I used to live with. We shared deep conversations about what shaped our identities, what strikes us, our dreams and which kind of society we would like to see emerging. Then I feel a fire inside [me], something ready to emerge. It’s exactly where my desire to paint them comes from. In this world [that feels like is] about to melt, relationships and people are the most precious. And this is what I’m doing while I spend months painting their skins. I try to show their preciousness.

When you start a new painting, what never fails to inspire your ideas?

It’s very much linked with the person I’m about to paint. But also, I would say it’s about intuition and something like the fire inside. I got a lot of ideas. It’s more about which one should exist. And it is very much linked with the strong desire to see this idea appearing in the real. Books, cinema, scenes in life, a glance, whatever happens around me nourish it of course.

“We do not exist in the same way with another person, and then with another, or yet another” – a quote by you. What is it that draws you to the complexity of the human personality?

I think it comes from an intention of accepting and understanding my own complexity. I come from a mixed background. Each part has a different yet strong cultural heritage. I took it all even if it sometimes meant that it was an opposite way of seeing life. Everyone has a whole world inside of them. We are constituted by ghosts – everything in us is older than us. Our names, our atoms, our gestures, the words we are using…this is absolutely fascinating to me. There’s nothing I love more than when someone allows me to enter and discover their complex paradigm.

Can you tell us more about the objects that your subjects are holding?

It’s a small box, like a small treasure, which I call ‘cassettes.’ These cassettes are representing the ghosts inside them. If you understand the reference inside the cassettes then that acts as the window to another world. It opens up a whole other world of this person.

When it comes to painting, what does colour mean to you?

Oh…colours are a language for me. It’s light. Especially, in painting, when you learn about how a pigment is found and the different ways it’s treated to make a special colour. From vegetal, mineral, burnt material, oxidation, etc. For instance, all the Mars colours (Mars Red, Orange, Yellow) come from iron oxide. It says a lot to me. They are fighters colours because the oxide tries to fight the iron. I don’t use them a lot because they can make other colours disappear. And I consider black as a colour and love this “colour”. It’s mostly made from calcination. That’s the reason why I use it in a very special area of most of my paintings. I call this area “the black paste” or “the painting for bats”. It’s linked to everything that surrounds us but that is not directly visible. It’s almost like without it, the picture can’t exist – it holds the painting.

So far you have lived in four different countries. How do these places influence your work?

Of course, every country I lived in had an influence on my practice in many different ways. The encounters, the history, the vegetal, the smell and the feeling is different in each place. To be honest, the country where I live doesn’t matter as such as I think the painting is my country. This isn’t a “cute” sentence. I very much believe my painting is a place, and it’s the only place I belong in, where I can be fully myself.

You found your niche in portrait painting. How can you visually show the depths of one’s character with their looks?

I’m not sure I can. But maybe you are talking about the pictures (cassettes) they are holding. That’s more of a way to enter into our relationship, or what they wanted to tell me. The cassettes can be seen as recording tapes or little treasure boxes. Things that open doors to something else or that show you a treasure. I use to paint a lot of them. It’s a sort of atlas of the collective memory around me.

In our culture, image is so commodified, a shift that mainly happened through the internet and social media. What drew you to a rather traditional path of painting?

I think painting is a language in itself. As we still write, we still paint. We just write differently than 400 years ago. Of course, the cinema, the recording machine, electronic engineering, fast communication were invented so, we reflect and process things differently. That’s the same for painting.

You described yourself as someone who has a deep connection and sensitivity to the natural world. How is this reflected in your work?

If I wouldn’t be a painter, I would have been a storm hunter. I love thunderbolts, energy and electricity in their “natural” aspect. The black paste is also very much linked to that. It’s made from burnt material, and I mix it with bee wax, dammar resin and some other secret things. It’s the only part on the canvas that I paint directly with my hands. It’s everything that is not visible. Everything that supports and allows what it’s shown on the canvas. When you think of something, you have few pictures in mind but you don’t think about what is behind or after or before or whatever around those pictures at the time. This is the black paste. It’s something about where we come from and where we’ll return at a certain moment. If you see with your eyes, you see the density where the composition and the colours are, but if you’re blind and I let you touch the painting or if you’re a bat, it appears clearly to you that the density is all around. The paste is almost sculptural. So then, the very flat composition is just a shadow of what could be.

Recently, I paint some flowers. I call them “Cyborg-flowers”. In this painting universe, the flowers are trying to mimic humans gestures or machines. Humans tend to be more like plants and try to do photosynthesis.

Tell us one truth (fact) and one lie about yourself.

I lived in a Japanese Evangelist Church when I was studying in Brazil.

I learned how to communicate with dolphins with Margaret Howe Lovatt.

What does ‘truth’ mean to you?

Truth is a tricky concept, even if we don’t go in a Nihilist or metaphysical area. Truth is a vector. There is no truth without someone who sees, feels and the fact itself. So basically there is no truth alone. There are many vectors. I’m not only talking about a point of view. It’s the point of view of everything we are carrying with us. Molecularly, culturally, sensitively speaking, (but other more aware people wrote theses about this, so let’s let them speak.)

Can you have truth if there is no lie?

That’s complex. It’s common but I think in every lie there is a truth. It’s like the sentence “there’s no smoke without fire”, I think that people sometimes are mistaken about what and where is the fire. So, maybe it’s more about you can’t have a lie if there is no truth. I think that ideas shape our paradigm. We are able to imagine something that is not true in the present and to make it true in a certain way at one point (we have some very good and very bad examples in the past concerning who wrote history for instance). I think there’s a link with the truth/lie reflection.

How do you imagine a world where there is only the truth?

Fascist.

Or fantastic if it’s about listening to the truth of each one.

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