Galerie Larock-Granoff invites you to step into the Gardens of Charlotte Barrault.
For her first solo exhibition at the gallery, the artist unfolds a vibrant, prolific, and deeply personal pictorial universe. Expansive flower fields, intensely colorful bouquets, windows opening onto nature, ink drawings, engravings, and small formats form a journey designed as a crossing: from the outer garden to the inner garden, from the profusion of the living world to the more secret space of intimacy.
“All of these are gardens—gardens that welcome us with their generosity and abundance, but also inner gardens, and invitations to constantly observe beauty.”
This exhibition also marks a significant evolution in Charlotte Barrault’s work. Long hesitant to make flowers the central subject of her art out of fear of a certain classicism, the artist now fully embraces them. Her compositions gain in scale, the formats expand, and the motifs multiply, creating immersive landscapes where color, texture, and gesture invite a sensory as much as a visual experience.
A Garden in Three Movement
The profusion of the garden bursts forth in large formats: fields of flowers and endless thickets invade the pictorial space. The gesture breaks free, the medium becomes generous, and subtle transparencies dialogue with thick impasto. These gardens tell the story of both the beauty and fragility of life, while reflecting a moment of personal achievement in the artist's journey after fifteen to twenty years of practice and research.
The call of the outdoors takes form in the motif of the window, a recurring theme in her work. Having painted interior scenes for many years, Charlotte Barrault now opens her compositions toward light and nature: a threshold that becomes an invitation to look, step outside, and live.
The intimate garden is revealed through her bouquets, ink drawings, prints, and small formats. Charlotte arranges her own bouquets before photographing them and translating them onto canvas. Each flower holds a specific meaning, tied to an emotion, an inner state, or a personal life event. A space designed as a boudoir extends this more intimate dimension.
Two new works echo Diptyque de la Joie, including La joie II, which was exhibited at the gallery during the collective exhibition Matières d'être in October–November 2023.
Created from photographs taken during the same session, they contribute to the exploration of the inner garden that Charlotte Barrault develops throughout the exhibition. The flowers, recurring across several compositions, become vessels to translate emotions, psychological states, and the shifting movements of life. Through these new works, the artist continues her exploration of light, color, and profusion, navigating between the observation of reality and a more intimate, dreamlike realm.
Specially conceived for the spaces of Galerie Larock-Granoff, Gardens invites us to slow down, observe, and feel.
About the Artist's Work
For Charlotte Barrault, painting is above all a way of seeing. Her flowers, like her interior scenes, stem from a quiet attentiveness to sensations, subtle shifts in light, and what lies just beneath the surface of the visible. The flower occupies a distinct place in her work: stripped of defining details and sometimes reduced to simple forms and flat areas of color, it becomes a canvas for emotion, memory, or inner reflection. Inspired in part by her meditation practice, these compositions evoke the cycles of life, transformation, and rebirth. In her interiors, this attention shifts to quiet spaces touched by a ray of sunlight or open to the outside world. Often void of human presence, these places nonetheless retain the trace of those who inhabit them, becoming spaces for contemplating the present moment.
This artistic search relies on an oil painting practice that pays meticulous attention to texture, light effects, and color harmonies. Trained with an appreciation for Impressionism, Intimist painters such as Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Symbolist figures like Odilon Redon, Charlotte Barrault has developed a visual language where realistic observation makes way for an inner, even dreamlike perception. This approach extends to her works on paper through ink wash, India ink, and watercolor, as well as printmaking. Discovered later in her career, etching—particularly aquatint—has become a favored realm of experimentation, its subtle tonal nuances allowing her to explore light, contrast, and texture in new ways.
Biography
Born in 1985, Charlotte Barrault lives and works in Paris. Following medical studies, she trained in various drawing and painting studios before dedicating herself fully to art in 2018. Her work has received notable recognition, including the Taylor Eddy Rugale Michailov Grand Prize for Painting in 2024, the Sennelier Prize at the Salon des Artistes Français in 2020, and the Taylor Gabriel Zendel Prize at the Salon d'Automne in 2014.
An Exclusive Exhibition from October 2 to November 14, 2026
Galerie Larock-Granoff @galerie_larock_granoff
13 Quai de Conti, 75006 Paris
contact@larock-granoff.fr
Artist - Charlotte Barrault @charlottebarrault
Text - Marie Gristi / S2H Communication
Pictures - Marion Saupin @marionsaupin
Flowers - Kohana @kohanafleursceramique