My work usually takes shape with sculptures and installations. Through discreet proposals, I try to move the spectator’s attention toward the forgotten spaces of the exhibition. Playing with light, natural or artificial, and transparency, I seek to question the conditions of the visible. Considering the artwork as sets of pieces that enter in dialogue, I constitute a path for the eye of the viewer in order to activate an awareness of the surrounding space. Through refections, luminous halos, hidden objects, and connected or disconnected devices, I set up systems of appearances and presences. Rather turned to minimal forms and simple gestures, my work appears on the periphery, in corners, on the foor, on the ceiling, and seeks to circumscribe a space. In a context of over-information where the mind is constantly solicited by images, playing the game of the surface and transparency is a way to oppose a resistance. Being discreet is then a way to occupy a territory in the background.


Marie Chênel, catalogue of the 62nd Salon de Montrouge, 2017

Camille Brée’s work is embodied by simple, minimal forms and discreet proposals that tend to echo one another and form ensembles. Her works are usually site-specic, and their creation calls for a period of immersion within the exhibition space, with the aim of grasping its different architectural or luminous qualities. The artist’s approach is rooted in the image, and involves a deep refection on the conditions of the emergence of light. Earlier works—from photographs repeating celestial and desert stretches to the contempla-tive videos, A travers (2013), and Lumiere fantome (2014) —retain the memory of a progressive detachment from all subject and narrative, in favor of a practice focused on the threshold, and the very conditions, of the emergence of forms. The essential quest is for another kind of representation and perception—thus: «It is no longer a matter of showing something but of revealing what shows, and thus trying to get as close as possible to what the act of seeing is.» The works on display at Montrouge tally with this search. Le fond (2016), a large rectangle of transparent varnish applied straight onto the wall, opens up a «zone of active sensibility»; it depicts the surface by subtly captur-ing the eye, while Les elements lucides (2017) mark the space in a fragile way. Materialized with the help of framing projectors, typical tools of museum lighting, Les eclats (2017) and L’Etrangere (2017) create a disturbing impression, the diffuse sensation of finding yourself in the presence of an elusive phenomenon, faced with the reality of an absence. In giving rise to visual events, in a fundamental relation to space and time, Camille Bree’s works create perceptive gaps and arouse speculation about the nature of the visible (what is to be seen). They open up a reality made of a play on transparency, on shadow and light, where one can feel the vibrating notions of discrepancy and of the Duchampian «infrathin.»


About my work, 2015

Through the image experimentation, I try to question conditions of the visible and create different situations about what to see means . I’ve been marked by encounters who shook my work, one with Gerhard Richter’s mirrors and installations in glass and my experience with the Hopi Indians of Arizona. They have in common an interrogation on photography and on the subject of those images. Every kind of subject seems to be overdone for me, so I try to get through, to go beyond what is represented, beyond what is frozen. Going up the image beam, I started to work with reflections allowing the emergence of space images and working with light. The exhibition Sans titre (plus ou moins) is playing with transparency. With thoses translucent films applied on the wall, I tried to give a framework in which what is shown is the space itself, its roughness, its marks. Most often my pieces are combined with architecture - they are often glued to the wall or to the floor. Also I want to explore characteristics of a place, how the light travels and reveals it. I like to think that this work is working as the film of a camera. It offers a break, a stopping point for images which are taken in their race with light. These surfaces are both empty and full because they represente potential images. They question a latency state of the invisible. I want to come back upstream of what we call image, to return to the moment just before their appearance. I work with imperceptible elements because what is important is the appearing, the disappearing and reappearing of shapes. Those movments create surprise. I know that I can’t turn something invisible into something visible because it’s not its essence. But I’m trying to slip into the gap in which extremes meet : the visible and the invisible, the shadow and the light, the material and the immaterial, the full and the emptiness, between to see and to be blind. I feel that this floating space between is a clear and inframince surface. It materializes a threshold at the born of the visible; a space showing something lost, something forgotten, something absent : a space that we could call surface.