Stéphanie Mansy. Syntone – Between past and present ; between Toulouse and the Pyrenees

Syntone: emotions in a harmonious state, in harmonious communication

Stéphanie Mansy is a visual artist based in the Oise region in northern France. She accepted the challenge of creating an artistic building wrap to protect the restoration work under way in the main cloister, right at the heart of the Musée des Augustins. Her work acts as a poetic backdrop to the garden, a proposal illustrating how the museum never stops being inspirational.

Stéphanie, who draws in an immersive state, has already produced work at the Musée de Picardie in Amiens and the Prado in Madrid, where she was also in residence at Casa Velázquez in 2023. She was shortlisted the Drawing Now Art Fair award in 2024. Using her walks and her travels as inspiration, she records on paper what she perceives of natural places undergoing transformation, in a gesture that is both gentle and powerful. Her abstract works are lived, traversed, overflowing landscapes. 

The Syntone project grew out of a reconnaissance mission between the museum and the Pyrenees. Stéphanie visited the many marble quarries of Saint-Béat to draw and collect marble dust from the sites that gave us the columns in the cloister. Back in the museum’s garden, she made a selection of perspective sketches, much like artists in the 19^th century. She also consulted archives and photographs in the documentation centre and watched the sculpture restorers at work.

The artwork born of these various encounters and immersions is a large black and white composition infused with small details and panoramic views, digitally printed onto fabric. It is a poetic combination of precise tracings and fleeting impressions, recorded in a selection of notebooks before being reproduced on a large scale. The slightly transparent building wrap is akin to a second skin between the garden and the colonnade.

This temporary cover gives us some keys to Stéphanie’s physical and emotional journey through the landscape, weaving a new link between the past and the present, between Toulouse and the Pyrenees.