Arnaud is a French painter and visual artist. She entered the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts in 1961. Alongside her studies, she published humorous drawings for the major daily newspaper Sud-Ouest, working alongside Sempé and Faisan.
Exhibitions
- Esprit Tribu Galerie Terrain Vagh, Paris9 March – 24 April 2022
- Exhibition Galerie Hélène Nougaro, ParisOctober 2020
- ABC Abécédaire… (Solo show) Restaurant le Hasting’s, CabourgApril to August 2019
- Exhibition Greenbow Days & Station, ParisDecember 2018
- C A R A C T E R E S (Solo show) Le Perchoir, Paris 11eOctober 2018
- Solo Show Galerie Eklectik, MonacoJune to October 2018
- Black & White Restaurant le Hasting’sJune to September 2017
- Beginnings Grand Hôtel de Cabourg M Gallery10 June – 16 July 2017
- Beginnings Part Two H Gallery, ParisMarch 2017
- Monsters H Gallery, ParisFebruary 2017
- Exhibition Grand Palais, Paris15–19 February 2017
Passionate about fashion and style, she was noticed by Pierre Cardin, who asked her to assist him in producing his entire collections. Arnaud admits to having been deeply inspired by the designer’s creative energy and pioneering spirit at that time. After this rich collaboration, she chose independence and became an international freelance stylist.
Blending black-and-white works with works in colour, Arnaud paints timeless humans, gentle and multicoloured monsters — all dynamism, teeming detail, vibrant forms, heightened emotion and retinal punches. Her black-and-white paintings act more as a common thread running through her work, evoking the movements of the artist’s soul and her permanent underlying questioning.
Insatiable for work, art and the press, Arnaud has always devoured — like the great ogresses of her paintings — all the culture, images and knowledge she can store away. She draws her unbridled imagination from the world, of which she says: “So much happens there that we cannot understand. In the same way, the characters and scenes I paint come out of nowhere, sometimes incomprehensible yet alive and poetic.”
Arnaud’s creations have their origins in her childhood, where imaginary characters, creatures of every kind and extraordinary landscapes mingle. These singular, dreamlike worlds have always accompanied her. Today she transcribes the visions of her personal mythology as she would write them in a dream journal.
Her galleries of characters, straight out of chimerical civilisations, bring incredibly animated paintings to life. Instinctive and intuitive, her work is nonetheless the result of a long, complex and considered questioning. Her painting, like a journey, draws us away — for the space of a glance — from a society that no longer dreams. She invites us to discover her own world: a lush world, forever renewed, offering a possible elsewhere…
In her work, she questions our coming into the world, while the origin of the cosmos runs, like a watermark, through her ontological reflection. Through her gaze as an eternal child, she offers the keys to several worlds — a hyphen between our reality and her supernatural. Arnaud wishes to tell the stories of her unspeakable universe. She invites us to let ourselves be carried by the force of her visceral creative energy: the movement of her lines is the extension of her overflowing unconscious.
It is therefore only natural that Arnaud also chooses to extract the phantasmagorical characters from her works to bring them to life in three dimensions and in sculpture…
Though she upends the codes of traditional painting through her fierce independence, as an aesthete she loves existence in all its facets — and life itself springs from her canvases, like a fountain of youth from which it is good to drink…
Videos
ARNAUD — H Gallery
Beginnings — Part One
Beginnings — Part Two
Galerie Terrain Vagh, Paris
Chaahk II
Before painting
In the 1960s, a young woman from Bordeaux, Marie-Françoise Gauffier signed her first humorous drawings in Sud-Ouest, alongside Sempé and Faisan. The signature changed with marriage — the eye and the line remain.
Arnaud’s showroom