About
Artistic Practice
Openwork and interconnected, Florence Régnier’s works are constructed in pursuit of light. Deeply influenced by the teachings of painter Lim Choon Jin and her own life experiences in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, the artist works with materials to give form to a delicate, ever-changing cosmology. She employs a mesh of raw fibers, kozo, or other paper pulps, the Néphilart®* technique, and ink. She creates installations, textile paintings, drawings, paintings, and screen prints in which the intersection and lines of the elements reveal their complexity. Serving as both subject and medium, the material allows her to weave what she calls an “experimental landscape.”
The artist draws inspiration from nature in the Chinese sense of the term—that is, a combination of two distinct elements: earth and sky. Through the mass of natural forms, she reveals her conception of the essential beauty of the plant, mineral, and animal worlds. Her practice is an ecology of materials, leaving no room for fiber waste and fully embracing a higher quest, akin to a form of spirituality.
The artist works with interlacing patterns, transforming them into symbols of the connections between individuals, forms of learning, writing systems, and cultures. She makes evolution, connections, and circulation fundamental elements of her practice.
*Néphilart refers to a technique patented by the artist: an intuitive and free-form method of working with thread, which gives rise to a complex and fluid material that forms the essential framework of the artist’s installations, textile paintings and sculptures.
« Florence Régnier explores the structure of elements, fascinated by their hollows and intertwining. Thus, naturally, weaving, thread, and tapestry are all elements that express measure, rhythm, and unity—everything.
Working with paper fibers or textiles, she views her weaves as a sculpted form, unfolding into paintings, drawings, and installations, subtly playing on her influences—drawn from Myanmar and Japan, as well as Morocco, Chile, and Australia.
Her entire body of work is both a political and scholarly entity, existing as an organic whole shaped by intuition and variation. »
Domitille Bertrand,
Gallery owner and curator
Biography
Born in Morocco, Florence Régnier has lived in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. She now lives and works in France.
She has also travelled extensively, notably in Chile, Australia, South Africa, Japan, Myanmar and India.
Her artistic practice has been shaped by these journeys and by her ongoing exploration of materials.
Introduced to tapestry at a very young age, she obtained a Master’s degree in Fine Art from Paris 8 University in 1991.
At the same time, she trained in watercolour and Chinese painting. Later, whilst already established in her artistic practice, she trained at the Manufacture des Gobelins and the École Boulle in Paris, studied painting in Singapore under the artist Lim Choon Jin, whose influence deeply shaped her relationship with light, calligraphy with Master Juay Phing Lim, screen-printing at the École des Beaux-Arts in Pau and textile arts with Louise Lemieux Bérubé during a one-year residency at the Centre des Textiles Contemporains in Montreal.
Florence Régnier has taken part in numerous exhibitions in Morocco, France, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Angola and Singapore.
In 2006, she held her first solo exhibition at the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation, followed by several others, including one at the Centre des Arts Holistiques in Paris and another at the Celamar Gallery in Luanda in 2014. She has also taken part in group exhibitions, notably at the Salon de Montrouge, the Intersections Gallery in Singapore, the Villa du Parc de Ducontenia, the Omnibus Gallery in Tarbes and the Saint-André Chapel at the Château de Corbelin.
Her work takes various forms, including textiles, sculptures, installations, paintings, paper weavings and pulp works. Her work was recently exhibited at the Jean Lurçat Museum of Contemporary Tapestry in Angers.
