CeCiL's Box by Oriane Bruyat

Venue : CeCiL's Box showcase (rue du Curé)

With the CeCiL's Box, the Cercle Cité supports local creation by presenting and promoting the work of emerging and young artists from the Greater Region in one of its shop windows in the Rue du Curé. This mini exhibition space, visible 7 days a week, day and night, offers a street-side location in the heart of the city to a series of original and ephemeral interventions from the plastic and applied arts, with the aim of arousing the curiosity of passers-by and questioning the collective imagination.

The 42nd intervention is entrusted to artist Oriane Bruyat and is entitled En dehors des Os.

This painting is part of a body of research exploring offering and sacrifice, inspired by ritual practices found in Côte d’Ivoire, a country to which the artist is connected through her heritage.

Within these practices, different elements of the living and material world may take part in the ritual: animals, plants, fruit, objects, jewellery and ornaments.

Brought together in the same space, they are no longer simply elements of everyday life: they become components of an offering, carrying an intention and a symbolic dimension.

The artist is particularly interested in the role of the animal in these practices. Its presence creates a relationship between life, death and giving. The animal becomes at once subject, material and offering. Around it, plants, fruit and objects contribute to the construction of a space that evokes a ritual setting.

This approach also echoes the history of still life in Western painting. Traditionally associated with objects, food, flowers or dead animals, still life already carries within it a reflection on temporality, the fragility of life and disappearance. Here, the artist seeks to shift the genre towards a more ritual and personal dimension. The objects depicted in the painting are jewellery, necklaces and ornaments; they are therefore not merely decorative. Like the plants and the animal, they become signs and traces. Through their accumulation and association, they construct a deliberately ambiguous scene, situated somewhere between still life, offering and ceremony.

Through this series, the artist thus questions what it means to give a part of the living world, what is chosen to be offered, and what kind of transformation this gesture may bring about. Drawing on references connected to her Ivorian heritage, she does not seek to reproduce a specific ritual, but rather to create her own pictorial space, where the living, the object and the symbol meet.

Opening on Thursday, 17 December at 12:00, where we invite you to join us in front of CeCiL’s Box for a conversation with the artist.

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