Raphaëlle Paupert-Borne
Born in 1969, lives and works in Paris, France
Raphaëlle Paupert-Borne is a French artist and director born in 1969 whose protean work (drawings, paintings, films, photographs or performances) bears witness to a singular and poetic attention to her environment and her most immediate daily life.
Her work has been exhibited at the Villa Médicis, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Maison d'Art Contemporain Chaillioux in Fresnes and at the 19, CRAC de Montbéliard. She graduated with a DNSEP from the École des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes in the mid-1990s and was a resident at the Villa Médicis in 2009.
The beginning of her career also saw the creation in 1991 of her character, Fafarelle, a clown that she plays and directs herself in a trilogy of films (Fafarelle at the Exhibition, Fafarelle in the Country, Fafarelle in Saint Nazaire, made between 1996 and 1998) and in performances. This character, a colourful and burlesque alter-ego of the artist, allows her to make very free fictions that already highlight her colourist concerns. She also made documentary films such as Apnée in 2003 and Marie-Thé in 2007.
From 2003 onwards, Raphaëlle Paupert-Borne began to draw on the spot, recording observed situations in her notebooks. She does not establish thematic hierarchies and draws what she sees, on the spot, whether in the street, at home, on a trip, with her family, in parks. She sketches and paints both close friends and anonymous people she meets here and there in compositions that mix the ordinary and the sumptuous (e.g. the 2008 bathroom, one of her painted photographs from 2005-2008), the modest and the monumental, in a constant back and forth between autobiographical narrative and the capture of reality. His stays in Rome, Paris and Constantine, for example, inspired a series of paintings and drawings compiled in a book-collection entitled Rome, Paris, Constantine dated 2011. Her paintings, which are modest in size and depict everyday environments and situations, borrow as much from the liveliness of the sketchbook as from cinematic narration. She made Marguerite et le dragon (released in 2010 and selected at the Festival du Réel) at the Villa Medici in Rome, when she was a resident there. The film, poetic and sensitive, follows the life of her child, Marguerite, who died of cystic fibrosis at the age of six. One of her latest films, L'Abeille de Déméter (2014), is an ancient musical comedy combining drawing, painting and singing with the inhabitants of the Cité de l'Abeille in La Ciotat, whom she met during her residency as part of the Quartiers Créatifs de Marseille-Provence 2013.