Johanna Baudou
Johanna Baudou
Johanna Baudou, born in 1984 in London, UK, grew up between London and the south of France. Her artistic practice embraces painting, drawing, ceramics and installation.
She presents a collection of paintings and ceramics that explore the sensory dimension of material and colour through floral motifs. Building on an ongoing exploration of the connections between humanity, nature and time, this collection views the flower not merely as a subject, but as a space for perception, transformation and embodiment.
The painting of flowers here breaks free from its symbolic burden to become a space for artistic experimentation: a realm where colour, surface and temporality converge. This dialogue extends into ceramics, where the material leaves the surface to take on a physical form. The shapes emerge as fragments of landscape or organic presences, carrying within them a tactile memory. Inspired by a poem, “The Colours of Your First Spring”, which evokes the brevity of life in the face of nature’s constant renewal, this body of work unfolds an aesthetic of the in-between: between the ephemeral and renewal, surface and volume, presence and effacement. Johanna works in layers, following a slow and meticulous process.
She begins with sketches, then builds the image step by step through layering, adding and removing elements. What appears obvious or spontaneous is, in reality, the result of a long process of maturation. Colour becomes a living substance, permeated by shadows, silences and light. In her works, she reflects an inner state, evoking memory, the weight of time and a form of inhabited solitude. Her work unfolds as a delicate interweaving of questions about our relationship with the world, with places, with time, and with ourselves. Her work forms part of a profound reflection on the gradual erosion of our sense of belonging in the face of the rise of the virtual, of speed and of disenchantment.
By rejecting the inevitability of a world in constant flux, she sets forth an aesthetic of stillness, of the threshold and of the in-between. Her visual universe is rooted in subtle tensions between opposites: permanence and impermanence, lightness and opacity, surface and depth, presence and absence.
These antagonisms do not cancel each other out; they coexist in a fertile ambivalence that invites the viewer to enter an intimate, expanded space-time, one that is even conducive to meditation.
Johanna works and lives in Brussels, Belgium.
