Véronique Champollion, Behind the cover ItaliaImballaggio 01-02/2024

Born in Valence in 1957, Véronique Champollion lives in Antibes. After obtaining the Diploma at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1981, she has organised exhibitions, installations, videos, and performances throughout the world for around 30 years, embracing an idea of “Mediterraneanness”, allowing her to present works in which colour, musicality, humanity and playfulness are of prime importance.

At the beginning of the 1990s, she founded the Art Mobil cultural association and magazine together with Jean Claude Lemalin (1957-2009), giving rise to the so-called Nouvelle École de Nice with artists associated with the Galerie du Lundi, collaborating also with Offerta Speciale in Turin and Museo Teo in Milano.

In the author’s own words

The idea of the ItaliaImballaggio cover comes from a book published by Ichnos Editions in 2023: Contribution à une réhabilitation du travail ménager et en particulier de la place de l’homme dans la maison. In this work I’ve inserted military and grandiose references from the history of art in a domestic context, using collages and overlays. Underpinning this work is the idea of “glorifying” housework to “make it worthy” of being done by men, drawing up a list of essential and heroic qualities. The page with Rodin’s The Thinker, in particular, naturally illustrates “La Réflexion”.

What they say about her

In her activity as a visual artist, she tells the history of art through narratives created on waste media: packaging, posters, newspapers and fabrics become papier-mâché sculptures. With the same materials, she makes the series dedicated to Snow White and the seven dwarfs (which have now become hundreds), and which is the object and subject of installations and performances that contribute to the creation of a parallel world, created out of the tension between different aspects of materiality: that of the model, the supports and, finally, the work. (Giovanni Bai, 2017).