Camille Bernard (1994, Paris) is a Franco-Scottish artist. After an art foundation course in Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands, she attended Glasgow School of Art, and then worked in Brussels and Paris. She now lives in the village of Uzerche in Corrèze, France, where she works in the collective studio, La Calade. Camille Bernard is represented by SISSI Club (Marseille).
In Déclins Diurnes, we find ourselves in a misaligned contemporary land that slips towards a time of parables, or a middle-age, or a time of promises. We are tempted to presume the subject of these paintings lie in their supposed stories. I imagine the passing of messages, a rumour, an unauthorised gathering; someone is coming, perhaps too late… The defeated, the exhausted, listening.
But there is also a project of articulating a contemporary mood. Something that underlines all experiences; a quiet exhaustion that is tinged with something softer. Bodies fill the frame, we glimpse the landscape over shoulders and between limbs. Or there is no one, just a setting who’s empty presence – quiet or sinister – invites us to locate these people in the real world.
Bernard’s work resonates with small and strange background details that would be at home in the science fiction writing of Marge Piercy, or Octavia Butler. Her worlds unfold in softly ungendered, magically symbiotic and co-evolving ruins; quiet, lost or forgetfully populated by a cohort of fellow travellers.
