WORD PLAY
Juliette Mahieux Bartoli rearranges blocks in linguistic her ingenious building modular artworks
Juliette Mahieux Bartoli’s colourful linguistic collages
Language lies at the heart of the London-based artist Juliette Mahieux Bartoli’s colourful, collagestyle creations. A keen traveller who has spent time living in Paris, Washington DC, Geneva and Rome, she grew up speaking French, Italian and English, which prompted her to delve into the study of linguistics as a source of artistic inspiration. ‘It’s an art form that’s also a practical tool,’ she says of the discipline. Her latest series of works, ‘Nonsequitur’, is influenced by Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, which posits that we are all born with an innate capacity for language, based on a set of inbuilt structural rules. ‘You have these blocks of meaning that you can take apart and recombine, but you never lose the root,’ she explains. ‘The same applies to the composition of my new series – the panels can be shown individually or together, and in any orientation, so it allows the collector or curator to play around with them.’
Mahieux Bartoli works with a selection of photographs that she has taken over the years, ranging from images of herself to classical motifs – a bust of Hermes, the messenger god, features among her latest pieces, in an apt reference to the theme of communication. Designed digitally but finished with real paint, their eyecatching palette conjures up the colours of Rome and of antiquity. ‘By drawing from our shared history and from the universality of language,’ says the artist, ‘perhaps my quiet hope is to provide a positive argument for European identity.’ frances hedges Juliette Mahieux Bartoli’s work will go on show at Gallery 46 (www.gallery46. co.uk) as part of the all-female exhibition ‘We Sing the Body Electric’, which runs from 2 to 28 August.