Entretiens sur l'art avec Vidya Gastaldon

We could learn lessons from the place where Vidya Gastaldon lives and works, a very isolated old farm perched at an altitude of 1000m away from a small village in the department of Ain (France). It is a place where the natural landscape is of considerable importance, inspiring contemplation of the earth and sky and silent wonder. It is also a plateau where residents have developed powerful forms of solidarity and collective commitment.

However, in this case we must be careful not to approach the work through biography. Since she began working in the 1990s, following her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble, the Franco-Swiss artist has in fact developed a body of work that is anything but personal (in sense in which it would be expressive).

His abundant work of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, video is marked by very diverse traditions such as American minimalism, hippie and psychedelic aesthetics, New Age, peasant painting, the sacred texts of India, the practice yoga, raves. It is culturally syncretic.

But we will find no attempt to express an emotion experienced in a personal way. The artist explained in 2006 in an interview with Fabrice Stroun: “Krishnamurti says of the act of creating: ‘Inspiration should not come from “I”. Beauty is the total abandonment of the self, and with the total absence of the self there is “that”. This “that” is the most fundamental thing I have and, therefore, the most absolutely common to the Other. It is this “this” that I try to feel and show. 

Collective commitment, the convergence of art and gift, the establishment of very meticulous artisanal modes of production based on repetition or on the contrary on forms of appropriation and transformation of found objects, games scale from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, these are all working methods put in place by the artist to distance himself from egoistic expression and develop a positive cosmogony.