Andrée Cauderay Vuilleumier, Sur un fil

A proposal and text by Oriane Emery & Jean-Rodolphe Petter

We discovered Andrée’s work in her studio during the APERTI open studios event in Lausanne and its surroundings in 2024. Located opposite the eco-district, on the Bois-Gentil side, she has been working in this studio since 2007. The exhibition “Sur un fil” brings together twenty-two works by Andrée Cauderay Vuilleumier, including a series of seventeen elements produced between 1999 and 2003. The selection seeks to reveal the persistence of certain figures and concerns within her practice, tracing a continuous thread from the 1970s to the present day. More than a stylistic evolution, it is a way of thinking about images that unfolds over time, through repetition, displacement, and successive reconfigurations.

The figure in motion, a true alter ego, runs throughout her work. Two small engravings made in 1974 mark a turning point: they signal a distancing from the academic frameworks in which she was trained, still imbued with formal rigidity and dominant representational structures. From that moment on, her work enters a process of deconstruction, followed by a relearning of gesture, writing, and image-making. This decisive phase is not confined to a single medium but extends across a transversal practice, bringing together engraving, drawing, collage, writing, and painting.

Developed at a remove from the artistic scene of the time, her practice has evolved according to its own temporalities and internal logics. The series Plume papier ciseaux (1999–2003) constitutes a nodal point in this trajectory. Conceived as a space of experimentation, it brings together various fragments (recovered papers, cut-out shapes, graphic signs) within an open system of combinations and superimpositions. Biographical elements such as a school notebook (1955) or a herbarium (1964) appear as active strata, contributing to the densification of the visual language. Handmade paper, introduced in 1999, acts as both a material and conceptual binding agent.

This body of work corresponds to a moment of relearning: relearning how to write, how to structure a language, how to create images differently. This return to forms close to abstraction does not constitute a rupture, but rather a condition for a return to the figure, notably through the artist’s book. The leporello format, present at the heart of the exhibition, introduces a sequential and shifting dimension to the image, one that escapes fixation. The story of Ariadne becomes both motif and structure, a narrative thread as well as a tool for thought.

Andrée Cauderay Vuilleumier’s practice thus follows a trajectory that is both discreet and continuous, spanning several decades without conforming to dominant regimes of visibility. Her work engages with questions surrounding the construction of images, their transmission, and their power, while asserting the possibility of a situated critical stance. Today, this body of work appears not only in its coherence, but also in its necessity: that of making visible practices which, though marginalized in historical narratives, constitute essential contributions to a broader understanding of the history of contemporary art in the canton of Vaud.

We would like to warmly thank the artists, Café du Loup, the ExoBus association, as well as the City of Lausanne, Loterie Romande, and the Canton of Vaud for making this project possible and for their generous support.

Special thanks go to Mariana Saramagaio for her dedication and kindness during her internship at CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute.