Micheline Simon

Biography

Micheline Simon, a qualified teacher of Visual Arts, taught for many years in high schools and at university. She now dedicates herself to her artistic practice and gives lectures on art.

Artistic Approach

Micheline Simon draws on all kinds of sources—image fragments, paintings, drawings, photographs, writings, etc.—to create collages driven by a desire for open hybridity. These fragments are traces that resurface, are reactivated, play with voids, and reveal a past that blends with the present, with the pleasure of making, of being in the discovery of the new. Here, rigour, high standards, precision, and coherence also give way to the unexpected, plunging into the infinite, into the human condition, into metaphysical questioning, revealing a kind of courage in facing the unknown.

An approach that is closer to the idea of re-collage: whereas collage, in its Dadaist origins, tends to create a rupture, re-collage is intended to reconnect, to recover a lost unity. To re-collage is to gather pieces, fragments, and scraps. It is to create a landscape according to the Petit Littré definition: “All objects previously scattered come together in a single glance”.

Working in a way that is not without recalling the free associations practised by the Surrealists, the artist finds another place for all these borrowed fragments, giving them a new life.

The fracturing of the image thus offers, through deconstruction and reconstruction, the possibility of seeing the past, of shifting towards something else, of being brought back to face oneself. The landscape that takes shape, amid ruptures, breaks, and terrain accidents, strives to structure dispersion, to create connection and harmony within the chaos of the self.