Interview with Thibault Boutherin
W: How and when did you start drawing?
Thibault Boutherin: I started to draw about 5 years ago, it started a little out of the blue, I was already painting at the time, which started very much in the same way, just one day I woke up and felt the overwhelming need to take colours and pencils and make something. I totally stopped any form of art when I moved to Poland to study and did nothing for a year. When I moved back to France I tried and suddenly drawing became more attractive, I had never had any formal training, and as such my style is very limited, which is why you can see the same figures running through my works.
W: There is very much a coherence in your drawings, such as the technique you use. Can you tell us more about it?
Thibault Boutherin: As I say, I don’t have any technical background at all and my drawings really come from a kind of inner search that I feel, so when I start a drawing, I never really know what I am going to do, but its always the same pattern that comes back eventually. So maybe that’s because its very sincere and personal that I it’s the same in the end, and at the same time never felt limited by the absence of technical training, im just trying to express emotions bluntly, as and when I feel them.
W: It also seems like the same figure is repeated in the body of your work like a genuine persona, would this be a representation of yourself?
Thibault Boutherin: There must be something of that, there is no calculation in what I do, but at the same time it’s a real work, its not something selfish or self indulgent, talking by myself to myself. I have always been very impressed by some artists who would have, not always the same kind of characters the first of whom would be Egon Schiele, he was quite obsessive in the way he would depict his characters and how they are always different people, however the features that he gave to them are very alike, so my drawings may each have something of me within them, but also something beyond.
W: What can you tell us about the recurrent narration between being in a relationship/ after the breakup expressed in several of your drawings.
Thibault Boutherin: I have always found a big inspiration in the sensation of adversity like if it was the moment that one is the truest to oneself. I have been through times like this and they have been very founding for me, moments of weakness and fragility but they are moments that I do not look back upon with bitterness. There were moments of real pain, but it’s a form of exultation, and at that time that I was going through these feelings I was drawing a lot, so it was obviously very inspirational to the work I was producing. Was it interesting is that, now that I am much happier and in a much more stable situation, I haven’t lost the inspiration, it just comes in different forms I guess.
W: Generally speaking the images depicted are very much torn, how would you explain this specific representation?
Thibault Boutherin: I don’t really know, drawing has always been for me a way of expressing things, to which I could put words, so it is definitely a kind of cathartic for me but I have tried to build a genuinely aesthetic approach, because I don’t want this to appear to be a mere psychoanalysis, but I am naturally very intrigued by the feelings of loneliness and abandon, and how one can overcome being let down by the one that means the most to you at that particular time. I have never tired to make drawings that would look like an exact reality, but what I want my drawings to look like are the very feelings that they try to translate, like anamorphose.
W: You have also worked on other, larger formats such as the fresco, can you tell us more about it?
Thibault Boutherin: There was one constraint that was annoying for me, unlike my lack of technical ability, the fact that I could only draw on A4 sheets of paper, at some point I found it too reductive and so, the same way, one day out of the blue, I took a linen sheet that my mother had given to me and just started to make drawings directly onto it, and so far I have done two large frescos like this. I should count the number of characters that I have done, as I have no idea, but they are a series of small scenes that tell separate stories but can probably make sense all together, and doing so I had the feeling that it was another way to be more in keeping with my actual goal, and what I am trying to say. The city that I am from is famous for a giant tapestry from
the middle ages which represents the apocalypse and as a child I was fascinated by it and its series of stories that when put together were all contributing to the same design, so I guess there is the same intention within my frescos, in a much more modest way of course, but the same intention.
W: There seems to be a religious dimension in your drawings, especially in the frescos, something even quite biblical, how do you place your work in relation to spirituality?
Thibault Boutherin: I am not a believer, in spite of my education, which definitely had a strong catholic base; however I can see how my works could relate to the bible and spirituality through a similar quest of truth, maybe a taste for the absolute. I reckon that spirituality and sacred books try to find answers to essential questions relating to the condition of a human being, I think that its also somehow what I am trying to do, on my very humble scale. I am convinced that they are questions that we all have, some people try to find answers in books and some try to find them in art quite incidentally I think I became one of those.
All images © Thibault Boutherin.