Opening on 8 November from 4 pm in the presence of the artist
MAGNIN-A Gallery is pleased to announce the new exhibition by Nathalie Boutté, an artist renowned for her unique work with paper.
Entitled Elles, this exhibition brings together a series of portrait tributes to women from diverse backgrounds — from Oceania, Africa, and Europe to the artist’s own family circle. While history has often preserved their deeds without keeping their faces, the artist here undertakes a gesture of symbolic repair.
The exhibition is an invitation to travel across territories; it resonates like a chorus of women’s voices traversing geographies and eras. Her portraits make visible those who were powerful and pioneering — anonymous or familiar — whose stories together form a universal memory.
To invent a technique is to invent a language. Nathalie Boutté’s language is born of paper — a raw, vegetal material. Her works belong neither to photography nor to painting; they are built through the patient assembly of thousands of cut and glued fragments. Up close, the eye loses itself in the material — in the paper fibers and lines of text; from afar, faces emerge — inhabited, powerful. This constant movement between detail and whole, figure and abstraction, reveals the very essence of her work: to bring forth an image from matter.
In New Zealand at the end of the 19th century, two young Māori women appear, tattooed with moko kauae, the marks worn around the mouth as symbols of belonging and lineage. Here, Nathalie Boutté incorporates bird feathers into her compositions, establishing a living link between nature and ritual. On the African continent, the figure of Tassin Hangbè, Queen of Dahomey, rises as a sovereign presence. Long erased from history, she here regains a face. Hidden among the strips of paper lies Voltaire’s satirical and fiercely feminist pamphlet Femmes, soyez soumises à vos maris (1766) — a discreet and ironic counterpoint that evokes both the weight of centuries of domination and the strength of those who opposed it.
With Gertrude Bell, the British traveler, archaeologist, and diplomat, Nathalie Boutté continues this dialogue between visibility and oblivion, once again weaving Voltaire’s words into the paper’s fabric. The journey also turns inward, through portraits drawn from her own family albums. These familiar faces respond to the historical heroines, reminding us that collective memory is also written from personal stories.
By bringing together these protagonists who have inhabited her studio over the past decade, Nathalie Boutté gives voice to women whose names have too often been forgotten. Her work thus stands as an act of poetic and political repair: she brings to the forefront those whom history has relegated to its margins. Between paper and memory, fragments and faces, Nathalie Boutté celebrates universal sisterhood in the very substance of the image.
