CB Perret's biography

Since she was a little girl, Carole Béatrice Perret, born in 1951, loved her coloring box and her crayons. The use of blue crayons for her skies and seas regularly left her agitated! As a girl, she made the choice of attending the school of applied art in Bienne from where she graduated in 1972 with a diploma in graphic design. During the next fifteen years, she worked as an illustrator for advertising firms in Paris and Lausanne, but also as a freelancer. Then, being a self-made woman, she devoted herself entirely to painting, a step, that a well-recognized painter pushed her do take. Carole Béatrice Perret started being very happy with her crayons and brushes.

Her first models were her kids, her horses and daily objects. She started to get the hang of a certain technique called "Tempera", wich requires the use of chalk powder and glue made of rabbit skin. This technique, although permitting great finesse in details, does not tolerate nuancing or watering down. (This method was used during the era of Quattrocento, before the invention of oil painting). To get rid of those constraining requirements and the technique's inherent rigidity, she started to familiarize herself with oil paintings, enabling the use of larger brushes, where more nuances and watering down seem to come naturally.

Whatever the technique may be, her paintings are being categorized within the family of naïve art, although her paintings are loaded with surrealist elements. One can distinguish several phases in the development of CB Perret as an artist: One, where she breathes life into a dreamworld, and another showing her passion for her horses. After those initital stages, she started painting a series of "chubby" persons and animals. These paintings seem to be telling a story, only the movements are interrupted. The lighting does not come from an external source, the objects seem to glaze by themselves thanks to their colour. For CB Perret, her "chubbies" represent the joy of life, the good mood, abundance and generosity. Botero clearly says hello, he who has shown vitality in a setting of gluttony.

After this followed the phase of the nuns. Those women, strictly dressed in a blue habit and a white coif, a little angle- and sorcerer-like, seem to bear many secret fantasies! Under the habits, childish and mischievous women are discovered: They are lovers, dreamers and very effervescent. There you see, a habit does not represent a nun well!

CB Perret especially carefully crafts landscapes without special foci, sometimes desert-like, from a broad perspective or simply a scenery where no human seems to have set his or her foot. Symbolism is ubiquitous. She invites us playfully to enter her innocent game, and as we do, we instantly become accomplices of her universe which is charming us without ever hurting. Other small nuns, associated with objects from childhood experience enable her to create a different world, made of naïve and cheerful, but nonetheless nostalgic and light-hearted pictures, most certainly provoking a smile.