Marguerite Piard Turns a Tender Lens on Female Nudity in 'Les Veilleuses'

Summary

• French artist Marguerite Piard is set to open Les Veilleuses at Stems Gallery in Brussels on August 14
• Through her work, Piard urges audiences to challenge perceptions of female nudity

Stems Gallery is set to open a new solo exhibition by Marguerite Piard in Knokke, Belgium. In Les Veilleuses, which translates to The Night Lights, paintings of friends, family and lovers find home in intimate settings, awash with warm, humane hues — “Les Veilleuses is about our loved ones,” as the gallery described.

Piard’s tender, often tightly-framed, captures transport us to an emotional limbo akin to the silence shared between two friends. Echoing this sentiment is her unique choice of canvas, opting for sculpted wooden panels or smooth slabs of stone. Here, the artist presents bodies in an ethereal, introspective light where her subjects, still grounded in unique characters, let themselves go.

Through these autofictional encounters, Piard challenges common notions of female nudity and the gaze of desire with an empathetic hand: “Addressing desire without sexualization. Glorifying without pomp and circumstance through the prism of tenderness,” Eloïse Duguay wrote in a press statement. Unapologetic and raw, the artist aims to liberate her subjects through the act of art making, rather than merely depicting them. “From then on, her quest for comfort, for solitary and shared confrontations, became a mutual emancipation.”

“For Marguerite Piard, painting and the body are one and the same. Both transform, tell, convey, experience, to such an extent that they merge,” Duguay contines. “They are bridges that we cross and on which our experiences are traced, which the artist encourages us not to conceal.”

For those who find themselves on the Belgian coast, Les Veilleuses opens on August 14 and will remain on view through September 14.

Stems Gallery
Rue du Prince Albert 4,
1050 Ixelles,
Belgium