Catherine Pugeat

She first worked on the human body — figurative, dancing, suffering, vibrating. Then necessity took over: she had to go further, deeper. To abandon the body and keep only the breath. Catherine then entered a resolutely abstract visual language, where gesture, color, and material became the direct expression of this erupting life. Between abstract expressionism, action painting, and color field, her work is born of accident, shock, and visual detonation. Each canvas becomes a site of tension between inner silence and outer pulse.

Catherine Pugeat works on large formats, favoring the steady structure of the square and the tension of the rectangle, where she can unleash her gestures: knives, brushes, cloths, fingers… every tool becomes an extension of her body. She scrapes, spreads, layers, glues, creates happy accidents, and incorporates paper pulp, sand, fabric, or even leftover paint. Above all, she paints in oil — a noble medium whose sensuality, density, and depth nourish her gesture, like kneading earth or sand in a tactile, almost primal joy.

Her palette is vivid, saturated, and rarely blended: red, orange, yellow, blue, dazzling white… the colors resonate, sometimes collide, to better embody the telluric force she seeks to tame. A powerful, visceral, and generous body of work that speaks of life, time, the dance of cells, the founding chaos, the fertile imbalance. A work that heals, that connects — and that dares, in every burst of color, to speak of life.