After a career as an opera singer, Nicole Malbec now works as a sculptor and painter, exploring substantial body representations. She creates her own symbolic system, transcending linguistic barriers. Where words seem to fail—in the representation of psychic events, in the production and interpretation of impulses and intuitions—her works become vessels that capture the traces of these immediate and fragile "substances".
Nicole Malbec’s work exists on the boundaries of the sayable and the representable. In her action-driven working method, she attempts to express substances within her creative process that lie outside the dialectical and conscious order. Her work is not driven by a finality or a prefabricated result; it is about bringing inner, elemental experiences to the outside and giving them form, drawing a thread between psychic and external occurrences, a mediation that takes place between heaven and earth.
Artist’s statement
‘Since childhood, I’ve transformed writing, everyday things, into drawings. In doing so, I turn them into a more personal language. My school notebooks were covered with drawings. Then I took a different path, and it was only many years later, while pregnant with my son, that I felt a compelling need to express what I call fleeting intuitions, which were ever-increasing. It was like a volcano; I absolutely had to give shape to these impressions. It was very important to me because I felt that otherwise I might lose them. So I filled sketchbooks with these kinds of visions, and I turned them into paintings.
Later, I felt I needed a more direct way to express these flashes of inspiration, and I turned to sculpture. I don’t have a model; everything is a model. I sit down at my worktable, I take a block of clay, I knead it, and a form springs forth. It is the direct expression of a feeling. Most often, it is the human body. I create an inner portrait of the body; I don't work on the surface of bodies. Through their interiority, I express my own and thus enter into communication with that of the viewer. I believe that where there is a body, there is also, consciously or unconsciously, a desire, which for me is the basis of all communication. There is no language without a desiring body.
I also have many flashes, bursts of colour. Alongside sculpture and painting, I have therefore begun a process of monotype printing on plexiglass plates to reproduce some of my sketches in a larger format. I then rework them by adding collages and/or paint, so that each piece is unique.
Human beings are at the heart of my work: their gender, with its fragile boundaries; solitude; the couple, which I would like to portray as a "battle of love"; relational violence; the violence of being in the world; women, whose bodies are still too often turned into objects; and also nature and the wonder it inspires in me. Art that speaks to our senses stimulates the imagination. The space of art opens the space of secrets.
When one of my artworks is exhibited in a museum, gallery or private collection, I accompany its installation with an a cappella performance. En-chanting the work gives it another dimension, a social, political and magical dimension. The place and the en-chanted object thus acquire a unique quality. This en-chantment, this breath of life, is a moment of communion and sharing, a kind of glorification.’