Choir of beasts | Cécile Raynal

Choir of beasts (Chœur de bêtes) is an installation by the contemporary French artist Cécile Raynal. This installation, featuring eleven animals gathered around a cephalophorous figure, could evoke a witches’ Sabbath, Saint Francis preaching to the birds, Orpheus charming the animals… or any number of other interpretations, depending on the viewer’s perspective. The animals, all of a similar size, break the natural scale and adopt sometimes unreal postures, accentuating the enigmatic nature of the scene.

The installation Chœur de bêtes (Choir of beasts), on which the artist has been working for several years, has been exhibited at Cécile Raynal’s solo show, À la table des Dames (At the Ladies’ table), at Montivilliers Abbey in Normandy (2025). In this historic site, long home to women, nuns and abbesses, the sculptor has chosen to present works combining portraits of women and animals. Cécile Raynal’s sculptures do not seek to seduce, and can even sometimes appear disturbing. Rough, they bear the marks of a passage through matter, through trial, and yet they stand upright, alive. They conjure up a world in which the animal, feminine, instinctive or rebellious side is embraced as an essential force. In the restored Abbey, the exhibition retraces the last fifteen years of the French artist’s singular career (more information on the exhibition here).

Cécile Raynal’s work oscillates between her studio in Normandy and residencies in places on the fringes of society: prisons, hospitals, convents… In these places, she creates clay portraits based on the interactions with the people she meets. Back in the studio, the artist extends this approach by drawing on a vast repertoire of tales, myths and literary references, giving rise to sculptures of animals and hybrid creatures, half-human, half-animal. Thanks to the animal figures in her pieces, the artist promotes to the viewers’ eyes the common language and the interactions between beasts and man.

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