Paul Zimmerman in conversation with Cécile Batillat
David Zimmerman: How did you get interested in art?
Cécile Batillat: As a child, I loved drawing, creating shapes on blank sheets of paper. In elementary school, I even gave away drawings to make friends during recess… My maternal grandfather, whom I unfortunately never knew, played the violin. At one point, my grandmother wanted to introduce my brother and me to music. My brother started playing the oboe. Out of contrariness, I refused to take piano lessons and started ballet and modern dance instead. I later returned to music with the guitar, violin, and finally the piano. I also enrolled in theater classes. After graduating from high school, I decided to pursue arts studies in Paris. I applied to the Beaux Arts and enrolled at the Sorbonne in Visual Arts. At the same time, I also continued my theater classes. It was at college that I discovered cinema and began a thesis on Luis Buñuel. I really liked the bohemian spirit of the Latin Quarter. I loved art in general. It was my breath of fresh air, a space where I could reflect, think, and disconnect from a certain prosaic reality that I found lacking in poetry. But, paradoxically, at the same time, I also became interested in social issues: I directed and produced a documentary on homelessness. Begging in the subway, young people wandering around the subway trains (and even older people…), all of this was new to me, coming from my province. I was faced with people on the margins of society, who had difficulty integrating and who sometimes even refused to do so… living in a different reality.
David Zimmerman: What is the most challenging aspect of your work?
CB: Getting started. Finding meaning in what I do. I have always asked myself a lot of questions. What do I want to say, convey, communicate? What kind of dialogue do I want to establish? And then, how do I get to the heart of the matter? Because once the process is underway, you have to let go and let it happen. Meditation has helped me a lot with this. Learning to breathe is something that allows you to expand your perception and understanding of what is happening outside and inside yourself. And creating the work requires patience in the details. That’s where presence also expands.
David Zimmerman: What is your artistic process? How do you create your paintings?
CB: It is a long process of maturing ideas and questions; connecting with images, symbols, and allegories to try to translate the emerging thoughts into concrete form. I am always seeking to understand what motivates me and what comes to life through this process. My primary source of inspiration remains storytelling. Through these narratives, the collective unconscious is revealed. Fears, hopes, and lessons converge, regardless of culture. It’s a bit like a database onto which each individual’s unique characteristics are grafted. Sometimes, photographs even serve as my starting point, anchoring me in a concrete observation that I then enrich with another dimension. And for this, the practice of iconography has taught me to bring forth Presence. I like to engage in dialogue with what isn’t immediately visible, but which ultimately reveals itself in resonance, in contemplation. What will make this presence incarnate, vibrate… The image tells a story; there’s always a connection to narrative in what I paint. That’s why I like the fact that an icon isn’t painted but written, revealed, embodied. The icon is inscribed in the lefka and the board. Writing is a way of enduring, of anchoring oneself. I could even play on words by saying that it also inscribes itself for me. In French, “ancrer” (to anchor) and “encrer” (to inscribe) are homophones. For me, ink also has this function of anchoring and embodying words. This medium becomes symbolic, like graffiti, which represents the carbon that constitutes us.
David Zimmerman: Do you have any particular goal in mind when your start a new piece?
CB: Yes. When I start a new piece, I know what I want to express, but I don’t always know where it will take me. The result isn’t always what I had in mind, but that’s not the point. Often, the journey is more interesting to explore and sometimes reveals something else. That’s the principle of the quest.
David Zimmerman: How do you know when the painting is finished?
CB: It’s inexplicable, but there comes a point when I can’t add anything more. I know then that I have to stop, before the power of the visual impact fades, loses its sharpness, and becomes boring discourse. But I can’t plan it in advance.
David Zimmerman: Has your practice changed over time?
CB: Yes. I experienced deeper, more authentic things there. Before, I observed a great deal and tried to reproduce what I saw as precisely as possible. I focused on the surface of things, analyzing and dissecting every detail. But it remained flat, academic, lifeless… and I seek to express a denser reality, an inner reality rather than a simple, concrete, and superficial representation that remains on the surface. The icon taught me about presence. I rediscovered this density in the poems of François Cheng. Drawing has become for me a way to listen to and transcribe an intimate narrative where the profound expressiveness of the subjects and the sometimes surreal atmospheres invite the viewer to go beyond simple representation and access an immediately deeper perception of being.
David Zimmerman: Which artists are you most influenced by?
CB: Leonardo da Vinci has always fascinated me. His mind, his curiosity, his paintings. I even took a round trip on the Eurostar from Paris to London in a single day to see the exhibition dedicated to him at the National Gallery at the end of 2011. It was magical. This feeling of presence that emanates from his works is inexplicable; it’s captivating. The very fact that he almost never finished his canvases gives them this sense of suspension, where anything could still happen. Michelangelo’s later sculptures also have this power to extract, to wrest this presence from the marble. Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems also provide this impetus, which he calls “The Open.” I also love the poetic intensity and the sometimes very caustic humor of Luis Buñuel’s films. But the artist who has most influenced the evolution of my current work is François Cheng, in his quest for the soul, for beauty as a spiritual necessity, for the profound harmony between humankind and nature, body and spirit. His poetic expression is a dialogue between East and West. I have drawn great inspiration from his two books : Vide et plein, le langage pictural chinois (Void and Full: The Chinese Pictorial Language) and Et le souffle devient signe : portrait d’une âme à l’encre de chine (And the Breath Becomes a Sign: Portrait of a Soul in Chinese Ink). Calligraphy gives life, breath, and silence, echoing the musicality of words, revealing the soul with rigor and precision through gesture.
David Zimmerman: How would you define yourself as an artist?
CB: Defining oneself means understanding oneself, setting limits. Sartre said that a man’s life is only defined once he’s dead… so, I don’t really feel like defining myself right now…;) I haven’t finished some things yet. You have to give me time… More seriously, I love poetry. It is the music of the soul. At the same time, etymologically, “poiein” means to shape, to create, to embody in the senses. Parmenides defined poetry as “the art that brings non-being into being”; the poet names things, makes them known through rhythm, harmony, and imagery. I also incorporate haikus into my works so that they resonate and give another dimension to the image. My work can be a bridge between spiritual traditions and contemporary abstraction. I don’t illustrate words, but amplify them through symbols and a search for inner light in constant dialogue between East and West. I explore emptiness, breath, and energy in a dimension that is both poetic and humanistic.
David Zimmerman: What are you working on now?
CB: I’m still working on my three series… The Breath Player, The daughter of the Air, and Memory and Introspection. I’m not finished yet… But I’m also reflecting on poems by Hannah Arendt. I like the way she identifies humankind with the Earth, our Blue Planet, and the title given to her posthumous collection of poems resonates with me: Happy is he who has no country.
David Zimmerman: What is the main message of your work?
CB: To show that reality is vaster than what we see. That we must always go beyond the surface of things. We must make ourselves available to listen to what they have to tell us. Each culture interprets only a part of reality and represents the world in its own way. In the East, interiority is emphasized, while in the West, perspective and cast shadows highlight exteriority. The human figure is in the foreground, and nature becomes merely a backdrop to enhance it. Whereas, in Hokusai’s The Great Wave, for example, nature is the expression of the inner anguish felt by the small figure in the drowned boat amidst the raging elements. In my work, the message isn’t on the surface; it’s a fragment of an inner narrative that resonates with the viewer. It’s a way of using the unconscious archetype of the fairy tale to convey sensations and questions that are more abstract and universal. But, as with allegory, the idea needs a concrete representation to be understood.