Cécile Bisciglia

Cécile Bisciglia is a contemporary artist who describes herself as a ‘BIC-er on canvas.’

Since 2009 she has devoted herself to large-scale drawings using a BIC ball-point.
The meeting between her academic drawing skills and her mastery of a simple tool, a biro, provides the originality of her work. She gets the same graphic finesse with a ball-point pen as one would expect from a pencil and it offers the advantage of being indelible. The skill she has developed with this instrument allows her to obtain different shades of grey depending upon the inclination and/or the pressure applied. Bisciglia engages in a real battle against the canvas, the painter’s own medium. The monumentality of the canvasses physically engages the artist in her drawing: “I stop when the cramps are such that I can no longer continue.” The fine point biro grips the stiffness and texture of the canvas to almost breakpoint and the risk of spilling its ink. The artist doesn’t draw definite lines but works more with shades and light, and this is how she produces the different patterns.

Through her hyper-realist drawings, Bisciglia depicts living beings. She explores the contours of the body, its femininity, its bestial as well as its human qualities. Her monumental pictures, truly impressive, catch the viewers off guard and confront them with the cry of a primate or a grasp of thick folds of skin or into the intimacy of the female body. The viewer is quickly carried away from a swirl of lines which all jumbled together reveal the work with thrilling impact. The eye of the onlookers alternates between the observation of the detail and the contemplation of the monumental subject towering before them.