Juliette Binoche canvases her film career

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Not one to rest on her acting laurels -- or her great beauty -- Juliette Binoche is risking the sting of U.S. art critics by showing a series of her portraits in New York this fall.

In September, Binoche will exhibit 58 of her creations in a solo show at New York’s French Consulate. The exhibition will feature a series of her ‘triptychs’ -- works that depict drawings of a director, a character as well as a poem, each revolving around a film in which Binoche has starred.

Since her break-out role in Andre Techine’s ‘Rendez-vous’ (1985), Binoche has been creating portraits of the directors and characters she has come to know so intimately while working on film sets in France and abroad.

Some of the filmmakers whose portraits she has committed to canvas include the late Anthony Minghella, Michael Haneke and Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

For ‘The English Patient,’ Binoche created ink portraits of Minghella (see right) and her character, Hana, a Canadian nurse serving in Italy during World War II. Binoche won a supporting actress Oscar for the movie in 1997.

In all, the show will feature 29 of Binoche’s triptychs, including those for the movies ‘Caché’ and ‘Flight of the Red Balloon.’

Other movies for which Binoche has created art include Leos Carax’s ‘The Lovers on the Bridge’ (‘Les Amants du Pont Neuf’) and John Boorman’s ‘In My Country.’

The exhibition, which runs Sept. 10 through Oct. 9, coincides with the U.S. premiere of Binoche’s ‘In-I,’ a dance production that she created with Akram Khan. ‘In-I’ will open the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s New Wave Festival on Sept. 15 and run through Sept. 26.

Let’s hope her art goes over better than her dancing. In London, ‘In-I’ was met largely with critical scorn by British dance critics, one of whom wrote that Binoche’s range is ‘inevitably limited’ and that there’s ‘no disguising the fact that this is a 30-minute piece extended far beyond its natural length.’

Click through for more artwork that will be part of Binoche’s solo art show.

A portrait of director Michael Haneke, created by Juliette Binoche.

A portrait of Binoche’s character Anne from ‘Caché,’ created by the actress.

-- David Ng

Photo credit (top): Juliette Binoche. Credit: Brigitte Lacombe for Lancôme International

All other images courtesy of the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France