Aude Ambroggi

One of your recent sculptures is titled: Contagious Happiness. Could you pinpoint the moment when art first infected you, spreading within you like a necessity?

When I was very young. At the age of two or three. I would spend hours in my garden arranging fallen leaves, one next to the other. I sorted them by color. It was like an unconscious introduction to Land Art (laughs).

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Since your parents have no connection to any particular cultural background, when did you first become familiar with a specific era or artistic creations?

I was born and spent part of my childhood in Kenya. The power of what I experienced there continues to influence me even today. Around the age of five, my parents took my older brother and sister to a Maasai village. I saw dances and listened to songs during a traditional ritual. I had to drink a mixture of blood and curdled milk. For me, this initiation marked my encounter with art, since it stemmed from the enchantment of a man caught in a tribal cult where paintings, headdresses, and colors played a crucial role. It was at that moment that I understood, without consciously realizing it, that art gives us eyes and ears to perceive what eludes us, and opens us up to another world. Art breaks the cycle of habits in which our lives are imprisoned. It allows us to go beyond this confinement of daily life that bends our bodies, our minds, our gaze to the demands of the daily grind.

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Has art been able to guide you, emancipate you, console you?

It has guided me toward a better version of myself, but it is an endless quest, since this search is in perpetual motion. It slips away only to reinvent itself elsewhere. It freed me from conformity and norms, and if it was able to console me, it was in the face of the turmoil of love.

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Did this journey toward art encourage you to perceive the sensitive, what is truly important in life?

Yes, absolutely. It allowed me to transform my perception of the world and therefore to transform the lives around me, because it touches on boundless and unfathomable emotional dimensions. It's like the decompression stops in scuba diving that allow you to acclimatize to the depths.

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Which artists have guided your life?

The German painter, draftsman, and engraver Max Beckmann, for his approach to the contemporary world and the great tragedies of 20th-century humanity. Barbara Hepworth, a major figure in 20th-century British sculpture, for her aesthetic, favoring the language of volumes and forms, she who associated with Henry Moore, Picasso, and Mondrian. Hieronymus Bosch, for his demented surrealism. The Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone, for his mastery of stone and his exploration of humanity and nature. The British sculptor Antony Gormley, for his questioning, through the human body, of humanity's relationship to space.

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With which artist do you share common concerns?

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With all contemporary artists who share the same human concerns as me...

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However, if we were to suggest the world of the English painter and sculptor Leonora Carrington as a dialogue with your work?

It's true that we speak the same language, and there are bridges between our worlds. Like her, my entire life has been shaped by travel, both internal and external. From Kenya to France, by way of England, being uprooted is part of my identity. But it's conceived as a fluid concept, perpetually encouraging self-reinvention. I love it all the more because it has a witchy quality that appeals to me.

Carrington's work lies at the crossroads of surrealism, mythology, and esotericism. You, too, amalgamate different motifs and forms of very original origins.

 

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What figures and themes permeate your world?

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Metamorphosis, nature, and its reaction to external elements. The animal and plant world obsesses me. Childhood and the transition to adulthood, which I've never been able to understand…

Are the power of dreams and psychoanalysis, so present in your work, creative drivers?

Absolutely, since they bring us closer to the "self" and escape all forms of rationality. Whatever art you practice, you are initiating yourself into your own depths.

Listening to you, one understands that you reject rational constraints, even displaying a certain taste for transgression… I refuse to be constrained and forced into the impossible. For me, that term is reductive and stifling.

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Africa, England, and finally France—how has each of these territories been a determining factor in your creative process? Each one carries its own culture, its own references?

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Africa represents the raw, earthy force. A relationship with the material, working directly with your fingers, getting your hands into it.
England represents the snobbish and elegant side of refined things. Sometimes even a bit over the top. All while owning it. I'm well aware sometimes how my sculptures can seem too garish (laughs).
As for France, it remains an open question… I'm searching for my connection with this country…

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These different exiles are expressed in your works through the possibility of being in several places at once. In your paintings, there are several levels of interpretation. A perspective of the foreground, the middle ground, even the background, all within a space that unites the top and the bottom?

Indeed, they are all complementary. They embody different territories within me, between here and elsewhere, yesterday and today. These different dimensions bring different riches and facets of the human being. It depends on the perspective from which we receive and interpret them.

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Beyond these artistic references, you are interested in all hidden forms of knowledge: the occult sciences, the irrational, Viking runes…

 

I like that everything mysterious permeates my work. I like this state of escape where the dimension of certainty no longer holds sway.

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The richness of your work lies in your experimentation with several forms of artistic expression, whether it be painting, lithography, sculpture, ceramics, concrete…

 

Technically, I need to confront the demands of materials, which are like commandments of life. Working with concrete was completely neurotic and paradoxical. You start with a powder that you mix with water, which becomes heavy and difficult to work with. Challenging myself with subjects I don't master greatly interests me, as it allows me to continue understanding the variety and complexity of life.

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For the poet Francis Ponge, an artist's role is to open a studio and take on the world, piece by piece, as it comes to them, and repair it. Could this be your approach?

I wouldn't presume to say so. For me, cracks and breaks are important. Like in the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which involves repairing a broken ceramic piece with gold powder so that it can be used again. By displaying this fracture, the object, like the human being, becomes all the more precious.

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In this era, where should we look when everything is visible?

 

Into the invisible. It's to be found in parallel worlds, those that exist, those we can access, or those we can simply invent. It depends on which part of your mind you're willing to open. What's important to me is exploring and paying attention to the margins and edges. That's when art plays its role, when it takes on what is marginal, what escapes the system and expresses originality.

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What remains to be distinguished, deciphered, contemplated in the world?

 

Origin.

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Is art, for you, a questioning of things? Should art discuss, contest, protest?

 

In the current climate in which we live, a world described by George Orwell as the terrible marriage of tyranny and distraction, it seems important to me that art teaches us disobedience. I would very much like the mission of the artist, if he had one, to be to assist human beings in the search for self-understanding, consolation, empathy, hope and fulfillment.

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How do beauty and truth inform your creative process?

They are the driving force behind everything I undertake. We owe beauty and truth to nature. I believe that the life that flows through me pursues something beyond myself, something to which I dedicate myself.