Finalists – Prix Picto de la Mode 2025 : Anaïs Boileau

Anaïs Boileau is a visual artist and photographer, drawing inspiration from Mediterranean cultures and the light of southern France. A graduate of ECAL and Central Saint Martins, she splits her time between Paris and the south of France, where she combines artistic projects with photographic commissions. Through her work, she explores the interactions between architecture, light, and the body. In L’Arlésienne, she reinterprets the figure of the woman of Arles through portraits and abstract images, playing with textures and materials to capture her mystery.

Anaïs Boileau was born in 1992 in Nîmes. She is a visual artist and photographer whose work explores Mediterranean cultures and the southern French light. She graduated from ECAL, the University of Art and Design in Lausanne, and in September 2017, she began a one-year master’s program in photography at Central Saint Martins in London. She lives between Paris and the south of France, where she alternates between photographic commissions and personal artistic projects.

Her work has been featured in various solo and group exhibitions and has been selected for several international festivals. She is a member of “Futures”, the European photography platform, having been nominated by the Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie in 2022.

Anaïs Boileau’s early work freely combined Mediterranean architecture, bold geometries, and portraits of women basking in the sun. Between these elements, a strange resonance emerged—one created by the sunlight reflecting off photographed surfaces: skin, façades, sunglasses, and other tanning accessories. The flatness of relaxed bodies echoed that of the colorful walls. Although clearly figurative, her photography became filled with the silence of forms, the interplay of their surfaces, and their colors.

This “Plein Soleil” series, which first brought her recognition, now appears in retrospect as a prelude to the more recent experiments she has undertaken. The narrative forms that make up her images are built in layers and structured to create dense compositions. The different media she uses add texture to the image, creating depth and a certain porosity to what would otherwise be a glossy surface.

“L’Arlésienne” is a project developed in partnership with the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône, as part of the “Excellence des Métiers d’Art” residency. This project offers a contemporary and personal vision of the Provençal figure of the woman from Arles and her traditional costume.
She is particularly inspired by a character from “Lettres de mon moulin” by Alphonse Daudet, set near the city of Arles, in a mill at Fontvieille. Daudet’s short story tells the tale of an impossible love. A figure who is absent yet omnipresent in the narrative, the character of “L’Arlésienne” never appears. It is this absent presence that fuels the mystery surrounding this enigmatic woman.
The project “L’Arlésienne” includes portraits that play with the idea of a character in motion, elusive, as well as more abstract, pictorial images, and photograms created from materials used in the making of the costumes. It is the interplay of textures and the depth of materials that fascinates her in this dialogue with the figures in motion.

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