Charlie Malgat (FR, 1990)
Residency period: March-April 2024
At La Becque, I had the chance to devote all my time to editing and creating sound for my new video ”Putris”. This short, wordless fiction brings back to my work the human figure, which had been missing for several years. ”Putris” is a cartoonish heroine, at once macabre and endearing. All flesh, she wears a mask that decomposes her facial features. She brings death to life. With this character, I’m trying to create a disturbing incarnation, to portray a state of decay. It’s a way of making visible what is usually obliterated. Like an absurd child’s game, mimesis gives rise to a carnal experience. Having recently experienced bereavement, I wanted to understand why my imagination around death was so abstract, and why I was so lacking in representations and knowledge.
The privileged environment of La Becque gave me access to calm and concentration. This serene setting was a calming moment in which I was able to immerse myself in both scientific and spiritual research into death and its vanities. As for the spring show, it provided the perfect opportunity for visual and musical creation. With the help of musician Nelson Beer, we composed the soundscape around my character ”Putris”. And with my artist friend Arnaud Dezoteux, we completed the special effects and video post-production.
This work was then presented as part of a larger sculptural installation, ”Double Paysage”, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (MCBA), as part of the group exhibition ”Surréalisme, Le Grand Jeu”, curated by Pierre-Henri Foulon and Juri Steiner. — Charlie Malgat
Invited at La Becque as part of a residency with Plateforme 10, Charlie Malgat is a French artist living and working in Paris, whose practice borrows elements from pop culture and continually evolves between several media: video, sculpture, multimedia installation, drawing and painting. After studying at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and Columbia College in Chicago, Charlie began using latex as her material of choice, because of its alluring, sensual and carnal qualities. Before they were brought to life in animated films, Malgat’s sculptures were conceived as places of recreation, as inert beings destined to be caressed, manipulated, abused or even torn apart. Behind their kid-friendly appearance, his works reveal a world on the verge of overflowing, in spasm, verging on agony. Situated at the end of the capitalist production chain, they expose the excesses of the “global digestive system” and its impulsive underpinnings.
Charlie Malgat, La Becque, 2024, photo Matthieu Croizier
Charlie Malgat, La Becque, 2024, photo Aurélien Haslebacher
Charlie Malgat, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 2024, photo Etienne Malapert & Jonas Hänggi