Interior design

Thank you to Interior design for this amazing article on Charlotte Culot! 

"It took Henri Matisse a lifetime to achieve the simplicity of the paper cutouts he made in his later years—works of great sophistication that nevertheless appear effortless, as if art had become joyfully easy for him. A similar sense of happy mastery can be found in the brilliantly colorful, strikingly graphic rug collection that Belgian-born French painter Charlotte Culot has created for Maison Rhizomes, an atelier she cofounded with Hannah Vagedes in 2022. In fact, Culot began her career painting still lifes inspired by the vibrant palette, flat perspective, and compositional framing that Matisse and the Nabi movement favored. She showed those early works in her first U.S. exhibition 20 years ago. “It took me about 15 years to evolve from the semiabstraction of the still lifes to the real abstraction I practice today,” she notes, a move toward pure color and form that’s epitomized by the rugs, which comprise most of “Weaving Colors,” a show of her current work now at the Amelie Maison d’Art gallery in New York. The daughter of potter and sculptor Pierre Culot and children’s book illustrator Micheline Wynants, Culot grew up in an 18th-century farmhouse in the Brabant countryside, immersed in art and nature. Confident that artmaking was in her DNA, she eschewed formal training, opting instead to study archaeology and art history at university, where she wrote a thesis on the traditional mud architecture of West Africa. Since childhood, she has worked with gouache, a medium she loves for its matte finish and saturated pigments, which she always mixes herself. Adopting a collage technique, she applies the gouache to wallpaper that she tears into various shapes and pastes onto a kraft paper– primed canvas. Built in layers, her abstract images seem architectural in both form and content. Intriguingly, an architect inspired Culot’s move into rugs, as she explained when we talked to her recently."