Biography

An unconventional artist, Christine Barone is indeed the artist of our time through the variety of themes and techniques that she explores.
Born in Marseille in 1982, art and computers – although in their infancy – were present since her very young childhood through her father, an amateur painter and researcher at the CNRS. Between coding games with him, black and white graphic drawings on the first Macintoshes and the drawings of Franck Frazetta, Boris Vallejo and Chris Achilleos from her father's library, there were also the holidays spent with her maternal grandmother . There, the smallest thing had value and everything led back to the imagination. The shadows of the fig tree in the evening became animals, the orange peels became candles, old fabrics a cabin, mismatched bits of wool an improvised scarf, buttons a necklace. Whatever the medium, the need to create never left her throughout her adolescence, also constantly practicing drawing to be able to put on paper what was already bubbling in her guts.

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After her literary baccalaureate, she chose to study psychology. But it doesn't last. It’s too theoretical, she needs something concrete. Direction a year of Upgrading in Applied Arts. There the multitude of experiments and discoveries satiate her greed. She then explores collage. From all these little things that are insignificant, trivial or good to throw away, she makes something of them, she puts them back at the center, she gives them value again, like a metaphor for ourselves. The words also take on importance and she treats them like these insignificant things that she accumulates on canvases. So they don't get lost. So that they regain the importance, the vibration that they make her feel.

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Then the fashion design school in Marseille, the International Institute of Couture and Creation. After all, she hasn’t designed any clothes yet!
It was at the beginning of her cycle that she discovered the works of Francis Bacon and Orlan, particularly her studies on drapery. Between cold horror and immaculate (but not so innocents) drapes, something shakes inside her. Sketches are born. At the same time, during these three years of study, she confronted this female body standardized by fashion. Her first real painting is a cry of pain that seeks the answer to this thorny question: how to fight against injustice?
Because yes, she knows injustice, through her sister with Down syndrome and the intolerant and mean behavior of others in the face of her disability; by this attack inflicted on her by a man and against which she could do nothing since "it's not very serious and if you had been more suspicious it wouldn't have happened" and by the rejection of female bodies which do not fit in the norm. Not to mention all these injustices which invade our world and which affect her deeply.
What follows is a series of paintings alternating between suffering and appeasement.

 

Then nothing. Life with its ups and downs and the e-commerce store she created in 2007 suck up all her time. Rare works appear. Always women. Always curves. Always looking for relief or self-affirmation. If she can't find it in this world, she will find it in what she creates.

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Her business closed in 2017, followed by a difficult period where she started painting more intensely again. Lost, the works are a reflection of her state of mind and what she is going through: colors invade the canvas randomly and without being able to have any control over them. Little by little, words and sentences appear, then female faces, as if trying to find themselves, the canvas acting like a mirror. Double mirror because by talking about her, she also talks about us.

 

Becoming a painter was then an obvious choice in order to denounce our world's injustices. But Christine does not show at first glance the inner storm that she puts into each of her works. A lot is at stake and they cannot be reduced to a single reading. And despite the heavy themes that she addresses, such as pollution, the place of women, the difficulty of being oneself in this world, there is a lot of beauty in her works because her goal is not to push us down. but that we rise, that we move forward.

“After all, isn’t art there to invent a new world? »