dominique torrente

Lives and works: Saint Etienne France

Website: https://www.dominiquetorrente.com/

Skills/disciplines: assemblage/collage, hand/machine embroidery, sewing, thread drawing, installation, thread on painting, photo, soft/3D sculpture, paintings/2D, mixed media.

Types/Themes: animal/animality, climate/ecology/environment, colors, duality, woman, fragility, human/humanism, freedom, connection/interaction, memory, mythologies/sacred, nature/plant, landscape.

Materials : vintage canvas, cotton, pins/needles, wool, linen, recycled materials, paper, clothing.

works

CV

Museum Overview

News

works

CV

Museum Overview

Nature, books, textiles, hybridization, basically, these are the four threads, not chronological, but braided together, which today construct the framework of my work.

I remember that as a child, my mother, an excellent seamstress, would regularly set up in the dining room, all her supplies spread out, and the fabrics (linen, poplin, cotton, jersey, satin, synthetic fibers, silk…) in a wide variety of patterns, textures, and shimmering colors, would regularly slide across the floor. And I can still see myself, sitting amidst this exuberance of color, a book in my hand. I felt that the colors were protecting me, and I was also spending a special moment with my mother, who was finally happy, as she was usually quite stern. Reading was very important to me; I have a very particular relationship with other people's writing. I was also particularly sensitive and I loved to draw.

So, it was only natural that I pursued studies at the School of Fine Arts in my city, and afterwards at the University of Visual Arts of Paris Sorbonne.

Then, after a few years of research, I felt free enough to use fiber to transform what I saw around me in art, painting, and conceptual art. I went through various stages, often including sewing and embroidery. Seeing Louise Bourjois's interest in this sometimes modest material, which thrilled me, I seriously reflected on it and quickly became interested in the relationship between text and textile, experimenting with the fact that these two words share the same etymological origin in France: Texere. I thus created minimalist works using textiles, and others using paper, thread, and screen printing. For several years now, I have continued to reflect on and create works always connected to text, even if sometimes only the title refers to textiles. The book is part of my life, like flamenco and creation. It's an art of living, a way of look and thinking about the world.

Since 1998, I have rediscovered an astonishing material derived from vintage canvas, a kind of embroidery on warp and weft threads, with simplified motifs embroidered with flat stitches. Once removed from its frame, this tapestry is a heavy, dense textile, with colorful fronts and striking backs, forming intimate and very free-form landscapes: (read the article that Marie Deparis Yafil, philosopher, curator, and member of AICA, wrote about my works created with this fiber, which you can find on my website). My works are listed with ADAGP, as well as in numerous publications.

[With Dominique Torrente, the hidden side of things, the idea of a "beautiful ordinary," embroidery, and the reuse of canvas weave a symbolic and subterranean economy throughout her practice, that of an inner landscape whose complexity she reveals in the form of multidimensional objects, of embroidered fabric. She could adopt as her own this saying of Louise Bourgeois: "it is the reverse side that tells you the truth." Through the alienating history of women that it conveys, textiles are laden with a political charge, the stakes of which Dominique Torrente appropriates.]

Excerpt from the text by Elisabeth Chambon, honorary curator, Catalogue of the exhibition at the Bourgoin-Jallieu Museum, "Plural Women", Editions Fage, 2021.

The introduction of Nature into my current creations seems important, even urgent. Materials are hybridized to create diverse objects and hybrid forms, incorporating techniques such as painting, drawing, and watercolor. From the pages of paper sewn together at the beginning of my research to large installations of pleated woven materials, color and hybridization are essential for expressing what words cannot always name. Literature, of course, continues to permeate my artistic universe, whether through inscriptions, titles, or other written traces.

News

dominique torrente

Individual exhibitions

2023

2020

2019

2015

2015

2024

2025

2026

Collective exhibitions

2022

2020

2020

2020

2020

2023

2023

2023

2023

2024

2023

2024

2024

2023

2026

Publications

2024

2022

2021

2019

2025

Prizes, scholarships

2020

2023

Collections

2022

2019

2019

2016

2017

2019

2017

2014

2015

2009

2008

2006

2024

2025

2024

BINDING MATERIAL

The seams of time

THE ART OF JOY*

Contemporary Drawing and Artists' Editions Fair – Saint-Briac - Brittany

In the weave of the fabric

IN THE WEFT OF THE FABRIC

The 2024 Artist's Book Festival in the Butor Archipelago

Carried away by the crowd

Predictions – Artists facing the future

Fertilized areas

Textile Crossings / Artistic Punctuations –

Of sap and light

Transformed!