Clédia Fourniau

Clédia Fourniau (b. 1992 in Paris, France) lives and works in Paris. She received a BA from Ensaama Olivier de Serres School of Art & Design and a BA and MFA from the Beaux-Arts de Paris. She explores the possibilities of painting and representation, questioning the conditions of creation, perception, and reception of an image. Through a constant engagement with formal experimentation, procedural approaches, and chance, Cledia Fourniau combines various materials and supports, such as dry pigment, oil paint, mica, acrylic, resin, and more recently, watercolor, on linen canvases or colored and treated textiles. The glossy resin, applied selectively, establishes a self-reflexive dialogue between the image and reality, incorporating both space and viewers into the pictorial field. Her work, seemingly impulsive, plays with the exhibition format and challenges the notions of seriality and repetition. For her, the act of painting is fundamentally dependent on the process and the material itself, rooted in a bodily practice and a sense of waiting—deliberately referential—built day by day in the studio, within a stretched and unpredictable temporality. She was awarded several prizes such as the Sisley Beaux-Arts de Paris 2022 Prize and the Reiffers Art Initiatives 2024 Prize. She was also the recipient of an Amis des Beaux-Arts de Paris scholarship in 2022.