Through painting, Faustine Badrichani probes a woman's connection to her body, in its most intimate and unspoken aspects, in the depths of ordinary gestures.
Faustine Badrichani paints women as they are rarely seen, that is, without lust. A hand in wet hair, a body stretched out in the sun, the languor of a late summer afternoon: her models don't pose, or hardly at all. They simply live, and it is this naturalness that she seeks to capture. Where so many gazes have made the female nude an object of desire, she explores something else: the body as a site of experience, as the silent memory of a life.
Her artistic journey owes nothing to any art school. Raised in Provence, Faustine grew up in a house filled with fossils and cicada molts collected by her geologist parents—these archives of life that revealed to her at a very young age that matter transforms and retains the traces of time's passage. This early proximity to the forms, materials, and cycles of the natural world seems to have nurtured her artistic vision. Faustine nevertheless veered towards finance, because she was a good student and the path seemed clear. The job kept her busy, but didn't fulfill her. The Provence of her childhood, however, never left her. Perhaps this is the source of her colors: the deep blues and ochres of the South, the warm light that bathes her canvases today, and this unwavering attention to time, which marks bodies as it patinates stone.
The turning point came with motherhood. Pregnancy, first of all, reopened the question of the body, of this flesh we thought we knew and which began to change before our very eyes. The birth of her daughter did the rest: she was able to focus better, to invest herself in a different way, to commit to a drawing a day for an entire year. The path was anything but easy. Self-taught, Faustine moved forward for years without reference points, without a defined route, evolving through difficulties she doesn't hide. But having learned her art from no master was also her advantage: lacking any formal training, she was able to develop a free body of work, owing her style only to herself, and it is this freedom that permeates all her work.
This exploration of the body took her far beyond the canvas, and it was perhaps there that she felt most free. In her Body Print series, she took the physical imprint of her models, who pressed their bodies directly onto the canvas, capturing the texture of scars, wrinkles, and signs of aging—everything that skin accumulates over the course of a lifetime. Young women, mature women, and the imprint as a record of lived experience, as proof that the body forgets nothing. What she loved about this approach was as much the gesture itself as what it brought to light. The sessions were long and intimate, and the conversation flowed naturally. Faustine asked each woman what she loved about her body, and almost always the answer revealed the opposite: what she didn't like; and with this confession came a whole life, its trials, its wounds, its joys. From these encounters, she drew a certainty that now permeates her painting: the female body belongs only to the one who inhabits it.
It is this conviction that the exhibition "Summer in the Body" extends. The canvases gathered here originate from photography, from snapshots taken up close, often among her own people, those close to her who agree to pose or whom the lens captures in a moment of surrender. Women by the water, in the summer heat, given over to those moments when the body relaxes without giving itself away. Blue dominates, the blue of the sea and the southern sky, the same light that already permeated "First the Sea," her first solo show in Paris. All of Faustine's art lies in this capturing of simple gestures, those that women perform without even thinking about it, and which nevertheless express the essential.
Between Hong Kong, New York and Europe, Faustine Badrichani thus pursues a work faithful to a single motif: the body of women, this territory which retains the memory of our lives better than any other.
"Summer in the Body – Faustine Badrichani"
Esther & Paul Gallery
17, rue de l'Odéon, Paris 6th
From June 30 to 21 July 2026
