“Creating is instinctive for me…”
Paul Zimmerman in conversation with Catherine Lupis Thomas
Paul Zimmerman: How did you get interested in art?
Catherine Lupis Thomas: I don’t think I was interested in art. I was interested in looking.
I was born with huge brown eyes — “globular eyes,” as some kids at school kindly called them. My mother used to say that, even as a baby, I looked as if I wanted to eat the world with my eyes.
And maybe she was right. I looked at everything: people, faces, objects, streets, torn posters on walls. I could spend hours observing things without really knowing why they fascinated me.
Much later, I started photographing, collecting, cutting, assembling and transforming all those fragments.
So maybe art wasn’t something I discovered. It was simply the way I had been looking at the world all along.
PZ: What is the most challenging aspect of your work?
CLT: To talk about it.
Creating is instinctive for me. Explaining what I create is much more complicated. People often ask me what a collage means, and my first reaction is: I don’t know — ask my hands.
I often understand what I have done after I have done it. For years, people told me that I acted before thinking. It took me becoming an artist to understand that maybe doing is simply my way of thinking.
I once said to a friend: “I have nothing to say, only things to create.” And I think that still describes me pretty well.
PZ: What is your artistic process? How do you create your photographs and collages?
Sometimes my artistic process starts with cleaning my studio.
I might go into my studio determined to tidy everything up. But when I reach the floor, I end up on my knees among all the scraps of paper, examining every single one before I can bring myself to vacuum it away. What if there’s something worth saving? An eye, a word, a strange shape, a tiny piece of colour. And suddenly I’m not cleaning anymore. I’m making something.
That’s quite typical of the way I work. I photograph constantly, I collect old magazines, images, torn posters and fragments that attract me without necessarily knowing why. Then I cut, move, assemble, tear, photograph again. I let my hands work.
When I work in the street, the process continues. The wall, a crack, an old poster, a piece of graffiti or something abandoned on the pavement can become part of the work. I don’t simply put a finished collage onto a wall. The street finishes the collage with me.
PZ: Do you have any particular goal in mind when you start a new piece?
CLT: Serendipity plays a huge part in my work.
I often start with an idea, but I never know what that idea might become. Last week I was cutting out a figure from a print I had prepared for New York and suddenly realised that what I was cutting could become a stencil. I don’t normally use spray paint, but I tried it. Then I isolated the legs and high heels, made a smaller stencil, and the next day I sprayed it in Marseille.
None of this was planned. One thing simply led to another.
I think that’s what I love most about creating: you have to leave enough space for serendipity.
PZ: How do you know when the work is finished?
CLT: When I can actually look at it with pleasure and no shame.
I know that sounds brutal, but it’s true. I can spend hours moving one tiny piece of paper, tearing something off, putting it back, changing everything. And then suddenly I look at it and I don’t feel the need to defend it, explain it or fix it anymore.
I can just look at it and think: THAT’S IT , AND I SIGN IT .
PZ: Has your practice changed over time?
CLT: The world evolves, and I look at it, live in it and work with it. So how could my practice stay fixed?
I don’t want to repeat myself just because something works. I want to remain curious, experiment with new materials, new techniques, new places.
If the world keeps moving, why shouldn’t I?
PZ: Which artists are you most influenced by?
CLT: I don’t really like dropping names. Although Jacques Villéglé is the artist who led me to create.
I think I’m influenced by everything — artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, photography, streets, conversations. It’s all part of the same process, a fusion of words, images, sounds and ideas.
What interests me most is not who influences me, but what all this information nourishes in me and how I transform it into my own identity.
PZ: How would you define yourself as an artist?
CLT: Obsessed.
When something gets into my head, I have to follow it. I can spend hours looking, cutting, moving one tiny piece of paper, photographing, walking streets, searching for the right wall. I forget time, food, everything around me.
I don’t know if that’s the definition of an artist. But it’s definitely a definition of me.
PZ: What are you working on now?
CLT: 2027 will mark ten years since I started pasting in the streets.
I thought it would be a great moment to look back at those ten years and share how they changed me, my work and my philosophy.
So right now, among other things, I’m making a book.
I’m also preparing to open my own gallery-studio in Hyères, which feels like another new chapter.
PZ: What is the main message of your work?
CLT: FUCK IT… I AM FREE !
I do hope it’s ok for you
please mention my instagram there are links to my website on it anyhow.
Can you please reference me under my artist name CLT
its the initials of my name but I sign CLT in the streets and on my work.
Can I see the interview illustrated before you send it out??
Also when can you send me the invitation for the expo so i can share it with friends in NY .
The 3 collages will be shipped tomorrow and I will bring one with me on the plane and deliver it to you myself on the 22.
AM I A LITTLE BIT OF A PAIN??? SORRY IF THATS THE CASE…
Have a great day and please give me some feedbacks :))
All the best from the south of FRANCE