Cécile Trousse

My painting is born from a need to slow down, to observe, and to take an attentive look at what surrounds me.

Nature is my primary source of inspiration: light on a landscape, a horizon, water, trees, mountains, the changing seasons, but also a particular color, texture, or atmosphere.

I often photograph these moments that catch my eye, but I do not seek to reproduce them faithfully afterward. Rather, I paint what remains of them: a sensation, an emotion, a memory. Little by little, the landscape drifts away from reality to become more internal, at the border between abstraction and figuration.

My influences also come from painting, photography, music, and more broadly from everything that nurtures my sensitivity. I love works where the essential sometimes hinges on very little: a light, a horizon line, a texture, a contrast, a space left almost empty. This search for simplicity and balance aligns with my taste for clean compositions, without, however, seeking to create minimalist painting.

Texture also plays an important role in my work. Layers, transparencies, marks, erasures, and accidents all contribute to the construction of my paintings. I like to leave room for the unexpected and allow the painting to take me elsewhere than where I had imagined going.

Painting has profoundly transformed the way I look at the world. Creating encourages me to notice those fragments of beauty, sometimes very simple ones, that we no longer see when everything moves too fast. I draw from them to create, but also to live.

My wish, as an artist, is that my paintings invite people to slow down, to contemplate, and to embark on an inner journey. May they allow everyone to reconnect with an emotion or a memory that belongs to them, and above all, to rediscover that capacity to marvel at the beauty that surrounds us.