The Universe

Coralie J Schmitt

Background

Born in China, adopted and brought to France at the age of eleven months, my journey is rooted in a founding tension between origin and absence, memory and reconstruction. This in-between shapes an intimate and ongoing search: that of identity, of the sensible, and of what escapes words.

My eye was formed in the demanding world of fashion within The Wall Group, where I absorbed the rigour of the image, compositional precision, and the power of visual identities.

In 2020, I opened my own interior architecture studio, pursuing an exploration of spaces as emotional, structured, and narrative experiences.

Since 2022, I have devoted myself entirely to my artistic practice.

My work is built around an aesthetic of contrast, radical and essential. Black and white become a primary language, at once raw and sophisticated, where light and shadow confront and answer each other. Chinese ink, organic and unpredictable, introduces an instinctive, almost meditative dimension, while acrylic on canvas allows a denser, layered and tactile writing, made of superimpositions, ruptures and transparencies. Photography, for its part, captures suspended, silent and introspective fragments, where reality tips into abstraction.

This practice is part of a demanding visual research, at once minimalist and expressive, conceptual and profoundly sensitive. It questions the trace, the erasure, the tension between control and accident, within a pared-down, powerful and contemplative aesthetic.

To create, here, is to reveal the invisible in its most essential form.

Self-portrait

MANIFESTO

I do not produce images.
I build presences.

My practice revolves around three disciplines: Chinese ink, acrylic on canvas, and photography.
Three autonomous languages, unified by the same demand: the audacity of what is right.

Chinese ink is foundational.
It demands mastery of gesture, precision of line, the power of emptiness. A direct, radical writing, where every movement becomes irreversible.

Acrylic on canvas deploys matter.
It engages density, layering, the tension between coats. A constructed, structured painting, where contrast becomes architecture.

Photography captures the suspended moment.
It works with light, purity, the fragile balance between appearance and disappearance. A silent reading of reality.

These three practices dialogue around the same axis: contrast as a founding principle.
Between control and surrender.
Between density and erasure.
Between precision and intuition.

Nothing is decorative. Everything is necessary.
Each work is part of a pursuit of measured audacity, essential value, and rightful form.

Coralie J Schmitt

EXHIBITIONS

2026

March 19 - May 9
Nouveau souffle - The Lyinc - Lyon

2023

July
Eurythmie - Galerie Véronique Smagghe - SL - Paris

May 11 - July 7
(IN)DEPENDANCE - Création contemporaine - Lyon

March 23 - 26
A L'ORIGINE - Galerie Colora - Lyon

The studio

Studio
The studio, January 2025
Studio view
Studio detail

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