Script: Does not include a transcript of a conversation with the artist.
Agathe Bouton is a printmaker and mixed media female artist working in Philadelphia. We connected through our friend, the painter Laurence de Valmy. De Valmy was one of the first guests I had the pleasure of having my show—episode 89. In this episode which includes a conversation with the artist, Agathe Bouton, we will focus and journey through her series of print works, Bouton’s “interpretation and interaction” with city structures. Bouton,(this quote is from her bio) “draws on city structure, evoking the stories lived within these spaces. Bouton both finds and creates beauty in the urbanism that surrounds us, –Bouton says, “my work transmutes decay and deterioration into serenity, story and hue.”
Her interpretations, her engagement with the life of city structures and dwellings is rooted in Bouton’s childhood, “growing up in Paris, visiting my Grandparents’ Le Corbusier apartment, watching Jacque Tati’s films with their playful modernism. I continue to be inspired by the urbanism I see around me in Philadelphia. Whether the building be a new block of offices or apartments, or an abandoned warehouse, an old administrative center, or a half demolished home, I am drawn to the history and lives they evoke, as well as their intimate beauty—whether that beauty comes from design or degradation or some combination of the two.
What strikes me, what draws me into Bouton’s works is her deep curiosity of the urban landscape- in some of the works, we can recognize the structure—rectangular forms with cut out windows but in others—we experience a broader view through abstraction– layers of shapes and colors. We see Bouton’s “interpretations and her “reflections on the lives lived within these spaces.”