Grandeur Nature

Claude Como’s world is larger than life. If her most recent wall installations depicting giant, fantastical flora and fauna go by the name of « Supernature », then the imposing portraits of women that have been a career constant should perhaps be her « Superportraits », or even, as a homage to their serial painter creator, « Superwomen ».

The prodigious, proliferative nature of her work seems to have found its ultimate form of expression in tufting, an artisanal carpet making technique, that Claude has made her own over a five-year period commencing in 2019. We were first drawn in by the multi-coloured installations climbing hither and yon across the walls of her vast Marseille atelier, discovering only later her earlier, more contemplative portraits and landscapes. 

Faces borrowed from history of art float out from flat seas of colour, a world away from her mysterious landscapes, suspended above and below the horizon line that she discovered on moving to Marseille from Paris in 2012. Each is a journey of discovery where she invites the observer to cross over into her imaginary world. Sometimes we lose our footing, vertiginous, in the hanging forests composed of so many buds, so many leaves, so many fabulous facets of a new form of nature where one shape shifts imperceptibly into the next until we have cut all ties with reality and set sail for a brave new world.