Maïeutique | Exposition de peintures et d'objets d'art | Nadia Barbotin | Art contemporain

MAÏEUTIQUE: Bringing to the surface. Giving birth to an inner truth. Through her work, Nadia explores memory, transmission, and our relationship with others.

MAÏEUTIQUE: A Socratic method consisting of bringing forth, through questioning, truths that the mind holds within itself without knowing it. We all carry within us truths that we do not dare to look at.

Fragments of memory, connections that have never been named, narratives we have constructed for ourselves so as not to confront what is really there. MAÏEUTIQUE takes this work of exposure as its starting point.

Self-taught until 2014, Nadia Barbotin initially painted with oil and palette knife, before opening up to other mediums: spalters, shapers, Indian ink, colored inks, acrylic, which she mixes without hesitation to give greater strength and transparency to her works.

This year marks a turning point; she chose to paint full-time and took contemporary painting, sculpture, and life drawing classes at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes.

Three years spent in the United States would reinforce her desire to pass on her knowledge and support other artists in their search for pictorial identity. Her approach, which she herself calls Maïeutique, starts from genuine questioning, without posturing or concealment.

It is not about illustrating an idea, but about bringing forth an inner truth, sometimes uncomfortable, often fragmented, always sincere.

This research unfolds across several series: Fragments explores cellular, intimate, and transgenerational memory, like a territory of traces and gaps; Tourbillons and Connexions shift the gaze towards our relationship with others, what binds us, transforms us, and confronts us.

Whether using oil or ink, on paper, canvas, or wood, matter becomes a vector of truth for Nadia. Her gesture has nothing decorative about it; it is a commitment.

Every canvas is born from a process of listening and acceptance, revealing the tensions between what is given to us and what we construct ourselves. This exhibition rejects barriers. There is no right way to look at a work. No