Carmen Perrin: Revealing What Lies Beneath the Surface

Art possesses a peculiar authority: the capacity to render tangible that which exists beyond ordinary perception. Carmen Perrin, born in Bolivia and shaped by a Swiss upbringing, has devoted her artistic practice to precisely this endeavour. Working at the intersection of sculpture and architecture, she concerns herself less with the creation of new forms than with the exposure of forces already present, already shaping the spaces and relationships that contain us.

Her methodology rests upon a profound dialogue between materials, bodies and spaces. This is not art that announces itself through grandeur or declarative gesture. Rather, it whispers of tensions and movements that inhabit the ordinary world, inviting us to recalibrate our attention, to look again at what we believed we had already understood.

Within the Mirabaud Art Collection resides ‘Des Mondes’, a work that exemplifies Perrin’s contemplative approach to material excavation. Here, layers of black paint are methodically removed, revealing beneath them fragmentary glimpses of a collage composed from photographic imagery. Only portions of these different worlds become visible to the eye, their incompleteness a deliberate choice that resists totality and demands the viewer’s active participation in meaning making.

The Art of Concealment and Revelation

This interplay between concealment and revelation speaks to a deeper philosophical position. Perrin understands that vision is not simply the passive reception of light upon the retina, but rather an active negotiation between what is shown and what remains withheld, between surface and depth, between the fragment and the whole. By removing paint to expose collage, she performs a gesture of archaeological sensitivity, suggesting that understanding requires excavation, that perception demands patience and a willingness to sit with incompleteness.

The artist’s insistence upon revealing what lies beneath invites contemplation of the invisible structures that organise our world. We navigate daily through spaces and relationships shaped by forces we rarely acknowledge. Architecture contains our movement. Gravity conducts our bodies. Light defines our visual field. These invisible elements are the true substance of existence, yet we tend to overlook them in favour of the obvious, the decorated, the immediately legible.

Perrin’s work within the Mirabaud Art Collection represents a sustained meditation upon this paradox. Her practice acknowledges that there is always more to discover, always something beyond what initially meets the eye. This is the province of serious art: not to comfort or to merely decorate, but to heighten our awareness, to sharpen our capacity for observation, to suggest that the world we inhabit is far richer, far more complex, and far more worthy of attention than we ordinarily grant it.

Imagery courtesy of Mirabaud Group (@mirabaudgroup).