Claire de Foucauld (France, 1986) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria) in 2012. She is based in Vienna, Austria.
 
Claire de Foucauld’s pictures are like haikus. Her images cristallise the evanescent emotions of a scene, fixing them on film. From interiors to urban or natural landscapes, from random details of the everyday to a piece of art, each snapshot captures the ...sometimes whimsical nature of a moment as well as the poetry of a shape, a beam of light or the tones of a color. She gleans her images during her many flâneries : « I never know what I’m going to capture; I let the camera decide for me. » Chance is at the heart of her practice, akin to a visual automatic writing. Her gaze only intervenes later, when she creates associations, often through the pages of a book, to create sequences and tell us a story.As the collected images accumulate, a typology of motifs emerges. Claire de Foucauld‘s eye might, for example, focus on fences, grids, barriers, nets … her lexical field speaks of obstruction. Combined with often hidden faces or scenes devoid of any human presence, it gives the viewer the impression that they just missed the party, they entered a space that was buzzing with life just a few minutes earlier. Thus kept at a distance, the viewer becomes an external observer of this inaccessible universe, filled with a sense of the uncanny, the way the personal can suddenly become alienating. A form of solitude emanates from this distancing which, far from being negative, allows us to renew our perception of this world that Claire de Foucauld strives to collect for us to grasp its poetry.