Beaudry is a self-taught artist who has followed an unusual artistic career. She expresses herself through painting, drawing, installation pieces and video art. Her method uses photographs and videos that she makes herself or finds online and carefully collects. In general she chooses her subjects based on the artistic qualities of the image. She then enlarges it and reproduces it as a close-up, making it both recognisable and unfamiliar at the same time. Her compositions are always simple, direct and devoid of context or sense of place, disconnecting them from other references.
Her paintings, drawings and, more recently, porcelain sculptures represent various everyday subjects intimately and without pretention. Her most well-known series examines difficult changes associated with adolescent angst. At the beginning of her artistic career she painted precarious architecture (such as cardboard or fabric huts). They highlighted themes that would go on to feature in all of her work: change, instability, fragility and uncertainty.
The artist is delving even deeper into these themes by exploring other subjects that remain part of the real world but are increasingly ambiguous, such as suggestive red underwear reminiscent of a racing car, half-open handbags whose intimate nature give the viewer an irresistible urge to delve inside and the empty monochrome inside of masks referring to the notion of identity and dissimulation. Charlotte Beaudry seeks to dismantle the traps set by paintings and implicitly draw the viewer’s attention to what is hidden as much as what is visible.
