Céline LANNE

Born in Nancy, France, in 1977, Céline Lanne taught herself to paint, developing her practice alongside her professional career. A turning point in 2017 led her to devote more time to painting, and she presented her work to the public for the first time the following year.
Her painting draws on Cubism’s capacity to bring multiple viewpoints together within a single composition.
She breaks down faces and volumes, shifts lines and reassembles forms into new arrangements. The face was one of the first motifs through which she explored these possibilities. In her recent work, Céline Lanne introduces human figures, extending this interplay of perspectives to the relationship between the figures and the space they occupy.
Acrylic, her preferred medium, allows her to build up layers and revise the composition as it takes shape. Curves soften the geometry of the forms, while contrasts in colour give the paintings their rhythm.
Her vivid palette sharpens certain breaks in the composition or draws together elements that the drawing seemed to separate. Working in series allows her to pursue these possibilities from one canvas to the next. A shift in framing, colour or arrangement can change where the tension lies within the composition.
Personal experience comes through in her choice of subjects and colours, while the paintings leave viewers free to arrive at their own interpretations. At first glance, a colour or a silhouette may catch the eye.
On looking again, the viewer may notice a line connecting two planes that had seemed separate, or a shape whose meaning shifts in relation to those around it. Céline Lanne uses these shifts to explore how the eye makes sense of what it sees.
Her work belongs to a strand of contemporary figurative painting that revisits the formal innovations of Cubism through an engagement with abstraction. A fragment can form part of a figure while contributing to the geometric balance of the canvas. This dual role is central to Céline Lanne’s use of fragmentation.
By varying the relationships between figures, forms and planes, she opens up different ways of seeing the same image.