Fragments of Infinity

The very first moment I encountered one of her works: it was not simply a glance, but an almost physical approach. The face emerging from the paper seemed to breathe, both sheltered and exposed, as if someone had gently placed a hand upon the icon’s chest to reassure it. This paradox — protection that reveals, a delicate veil that unveils — runs through every work by SylvieC and is the emotional signature I continue to seek and to celebrate in the exhibitions I curate for her.

StripArt, as it has grown out of her background in photography and graphic design, unfolds along two axes: the digital as a laboratory of ideas, and material manipulation as a ritual act. The technical score Sylvie has developed is at once simple in principle and astonishingly complex in its outcome.

The first phase is one of methodical research: it is never about choosing a face because it is “famous,” but about recognizing in that image the potential for relationship — a gaze, a fold of skin, a gesture of the hand that can sustain the intensity of transformation. Sylvie collects archival materials, film stills, portraits, photographic enlargements, but also sounds and words: for her, the icon is always a human landscape, never merely a face. From this investigation emerge the dominant colors and tonal notes that will guide the process.

The digital phase that follows is a laboratory of distillation. With photo-editing tools — true operating tables for the image — Sylvie separates planes of light, matter, and color, experimenting with balances of contrast and saturation, and building multiple “variants” of the same subject. Here, error is welcome: often it is precisely an unexpected alteration of the file that suggests the next step. The digital, for her, is never a cold instrument of reproduction; it is the place where emotion takes technical form.

Then comes the print on photographic paper: a deliberate choice, for paper is, to Sylvie, a body. Its soft, sensual nature becomes a field of action; the paper holds ink but responds to physical manipulation, absorbing incisions, folds, and patinas. Here, the passage from vision to touch is accomplished: once fixed onto paper, the image is fragmented — not at random, but following a rhythmic score that may be vertical, horizontal, alternating — and each segment is treated as an autonomous element.

I speak of fragmentation, but it is crucial to stress the care Sylvie applies in recomposition. This is not sterile dismemberment: each strip is shaped, tested, sometimes crimped or gently rolled; at other times pressed with delicate pressure to create reliefs; in some works, subtle veils of paint or graphite interventions are added, recalling the drawn line. The assemblage unfolds in stages: the composition is tried, allowed to rest, re-examined under changing light and shadow. The space between the strips — their distance, torsion, inclination — becomes expressive material: it determines how the face fractures and reassembles in the viewer’s gaze, setting the visual rhythm and chromatic vibration.

Calling this structure a “shell” is no rhetorical flourish: the stratification creates a protective layer that does not isolate. On the contrary, it is a membrane that amplifies. The pattern of cuts and folds generates micro-shadows; these shadows bring depth and shift with the light, so that the work is never the same: it changes with the hour, with the visitor’s movement, with the tilt of the head of the observer. In exhibition, this quality becomes performative: I hang the works at carefully measured distances from the wall, adjusting the lighting so that the relief is legible without destroying the mystery of the surface.

From a material perspective, Sylvie works with a palette of solutions that preserve delicacy: neutral pH adhesives that do not alter the paper, finishing pastes that consolidate thickness without plastifying the surface, at times thin protective veils that safeguard pigments. Where a work is intended to be touched or to participate in performative contexts, the finish is designed to withstand human contact; in rarer editions, by contrast, she privileges museal conservation with anti-reflective glass and cases that still allow light to play across the three-dimensionality.

The character of the icons Sylvie chooses is as technical as it is moral. She does not merely reproduce: she elevates the figure into a personal symbol, building a relationship of care. This aesthetic choice rests on an ethics of observation: the celebrity steps out of its aura and into a domestic, almost confidential dimension. It is not a sacrilegious appropriation, but a benevolent revelation: an act of protection and intimacy. In an era when public images are consumed at breakneck speed, Sylvie’s gesture archives and restitutes memory, slows consumption, and invites recognition of the human.

In dialogue with the masters who have inspired her — Warhol, Haring, Pierre Soulages, Matisse, Banksy, McCurry, Vivian Maier — I see in her works an original synthesis. From Warhol she inherits reflection on fame as material; from Haring, the sense of sign as accessible language; from Soulages, reverence for matter; from Matisse, chromatic boldness; from McCurry and Maier, a passion for the gaze that tells a story. Yet Sylvie does not merely accumulate: she translates these legacies into a personal code that uses fragmentation to restitute complexity, and protection to foster empathy.

Allow me to recount two experiences that reveal the expressive and social potential of her work. The first is the project for the Festival Art de Femmes, in which creation unfolded as a collective performance. Sylvie’s intervention, born in a context of celebration and commitment, had to dialogue with time, audience, and rhythm: the technical challenge was to transform an act of execution into a durable object, capable of conserving the performance’s energy. For this reason, some elements were created live, others prepared in the studio and assembled on site; the outcome was a work that carried the trace of the event — its light, movement, and bodies — and which, once sold, converted presence and participation into tangible resources for a social cause. This interplay between performative gesture and art object is for Sylvie a privileged path of meaning: art as an instrument of collective care.

The second experience is her commissioned work for collectors. Here one perceives the tension between personalization and artistic integrity. Sylvie approaches such commissions as a conversation: she listens to the client’s desire but refuses mere execution of a brief. The result emerges through creative negotiation, in which the collector becomes an interlocutor and their memory — sometimes private stories, family photographs, cherished objects — enters as iconographic element. The process is delicate: translating intimate expectations into a StripArt piece requires discipline, emotional steadiness, and technical clarity. These works often reveal a more intimate side of her iconography: no longer only public figures, but presences that carry symbolic value for those who commission them.

From an exhibition standpoint, Sylvie’s works enter into a perfect dialogue with space and with other arts: a room that welcomes them in semi-darkness, with focal lights accentuating reliefs; minimal soundscapes that suspend time; captions that do not explain everything but suggest the web of relations from which the work was born. To curate Sylvie, then, is to care for the visitor’s experience: to create pauses, perceptible distances, possibilities of movement that reveal the piece in progression.

As for conservation and the future of her research, Sylvie herself harbors the desire to bring more material into her practice: substances capable of dialoguing with paper, layers that add tactile depth, perhaps metallic or textile inserts that expand the concept of the shell. Beyond this, I envision further performative possibilities — works that transform over time, regenerate through public interaction, and inhabit hybrid spaces between gallery and everyday life. To grow in three-dimensionality would be to extend her idea: no longer only visual protection, but protective-space, an invitation to touch and to narrate.

Finally, permit me a curatorial reflection: Sylvie’s strength lies in her moral conduct of the image. In an age where the iconic is consumed and discarded with equal speed, she enacts the reverse gesture: she slows, she tends, she restores intimacy. Her works are, for me, acts of aesthetic responsibility. I would call them — without rhetoric — small secular liturgies: visual rituals that recompose our relationship with the figures we culturally inhabit. And each time, as curator, that I present her work, I strive to reconstruct that gesture of nearness that makes it possible — to place a hand, to offer a breath, to deliver a face to those who will see it for the very first time.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved