Artist Julian Charrière on creating for Ruinart
Jun 02, 2025
As part of Maison Ruinart’s ongoing Conversations with Nature series, artist Julian Charrière has conceived an ode to the ancient Lutetian Sea that once covered the Champagne region. At Art Basel Hong Kong to unveil his work, he speaks to Stephenie Gee about the collaboration, his creative process and art as a vehicle for awareness
For nearly three centuries, Ruinart, the world’s oldest extant champagne house, has maintained a patronage of the arts inspired by Dom Thierry Ruinart, the uncle of founder Nicolas Ruinart who became the “Master of Art” to Louis XIV in 1674, aged just 17. Today, the house supports the arts in myriad ways, from nurturing emerging talent to the annual Carte Blanche commission, whose themed Conversations with Nature series invites engaged artists to inspire change through unique pieces that uplift the maison’s ardent commitment to nature.
This year’s edition marks the turn of Julian Charrière. The collaboration was a natural fit. Half French (Champagne, to be specific) and half Swiss, Charrière explores the intersections of time, geology and human impact, challenging our perception of nature – not as something separate from us, but as a force constantly shaped by human history and intervention.
Conversations with Nature brings this perspective to Ruinart’s terroir, whose limestone-rich soil holds traces of the Lutetian Sea, a vast marine world under which the Champagne region was submerged 45 million years ago. The crayères, or chalk pits, beneath Ruinart’s estate at
4 Rue des Crayères in Reims are ghostly echoes of this past, a reminder that landscapes are never static.
Paying homage to this lost ocean while reflecting on the fragile state of today’s marine ecosystems, Charrière created a series of photographic portraits of coral reefs – intricate, living structures similar to that of the Lutetian Sea. To be exhibited at art fairs of which Ruinart is a partner throughout the year – beginning at Art Basel Hong Kong, followed by Berlin Gallery Weekend, Art Basel in Basel, Frieze Seoul and Art Basel Paris – these digital prints were segmented chromatically and the colours reinterpreted using powdered pigments made from crushed limestone, corals and chalk that Charrière sourced locally from the region.
Created with an 18th-century lithographic process, the artworks reveal pale spectral images that evoke the fading vitality of these ecosystems, compelling viewers to consider both the resilience of nature and its vulnerability in the face of environmental change.
Beyond these prints, Charrière has also designed an immersive sound installation for 4 Rue des Crayères to be unveiled in the summer, where the memory of the Lutetian Sea collides with the imperilled frequencies of today’s coral reefs.
Tell us more about these works.
Basically the whole ground in Champagne is almost 200 metres of pure chalk. And this chalk is the remains of the Lutetian Sea, which a very long time ago was covering Europe. So when you go down into the crayères where they store the champagne, you’re not only going underground, you’re diving into the memory of a sea. And that’s what interested me the most, so I wanted to try to invoke the ghosts of the sea.
In order to do so, I went to a lot of different places to do sound recording. I recorded fishes, coral reefs, crustaceans, waves – we think the sea is silent, but it’s full of noises, full of sounds, full of voices. We’re just not able to grasp the sounds because our senses are limited underwater. So then I decided to use all these recordings to create a sound piece that would resonate with the actual geology of one of the chalk pits. And as I was doing that, I also decided to portray some of the places that I was actually listening to and recording because
I got absolutely fascinated by the shapes of the coral.
Coral reefs are under great stress – induced by our species, acidification of ocean, rising temperatures. They have this incredible beauty, but it’s still a world that we don’t experience so often. There is a lot of photography of coral around, but I think they don’t really give justice to the beauty and the complexity of the architecture of the reef itself. So the portraits here [at Art Basel] were kind of a humble try to create another type of aesthetic, visual language to show a place that we’ve all been seeing but in a new light. And I liked this idea of trying to reconcile materiality and visuality, because the visual world is embedded in the materiality of the world, but we tend to forget that because we’re all on a smartphone taking selfies.
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So I made these pictures and instead of just printing them in CMYK, I decided to take some of the chalk from the Reims maison and some dead corals, crush them and create pigments. With these pigments, I created a colour palette that I digitalised, and then I used this colour palette to separate my pictures, which were actually made in RGB, normal three-colour photography. Then I used a technique from the 18th century called photolithography, where you use a big plate of stone that you etch to print the images. I printed my images with the pigments I made and that’s why these prints look almost like sedimentation, because geology settles on the piece of paper. At the same time, they’re like a snapshot, a memory, but then there’s the actual substance which carried this memory so it’s like the convergence of both. They have this kind of ghost-like quality, but it’s almost like a chalk drawing too. It’s not photography anymore, it’s something more.
I imagine there were many challenges.
Absolutely. It’s never been done before, so we had to develop the technique. Photolithography is a very, very old technique and this work is trying to mix new media and what we can do today with our digital camera and Photoshop and computing, with something from the 18th century. And so when you’re trying to clash these two times to make something new, it’s very complicated. We had to unlearn the way I was working with digital photography, and then the printer I worked with, he had to unlearn how to do photolithography. So we both had to unlearn and relearn to create these pieces.
It took us almost a year of development to actually master the technique and get this look. It looks just whiteish, but actually if you look very closely there’s five different tonalities. So it was quite challenging to make the gravure, and you also have to take into consideration that the pigments are white and you print on paper, which is also white. So you need to always print with the brightest first. You print white on white, so you never really see the image. And that’s why I say it’s almost like sedimentation because every time you print a new layer, then the image starts to appear, as if the ghosts, which are kind of like lingering on the paper, come to life.
You had to dive?
I dive a lot. Diving is a big part of my work. I learned to dive for my art actually. I’ve explored a lot of the surface – deserts, mountains – and then I started
to become interested in what was underneath. Underwater for me is a great source of inspiration because once you’re immersed in water, you feel that you’re really a part of the whole ecosystem. Up here, we have clothes, air. We don’t really feel the air between us connecting us.
COVID made us a bit more aware – if I breathe towards you, you might get my aerosols. But generally underwater you understand this strong connection much more. There’s this kind of total immersion where the self or the individuality almost dissolves, and that’s something that really strikes me and I try to reflect that in some of my works.
What was the message behind these pieces?
I want to intrigue people. This is a very particular piece relating to the physicality and reality of the Champagne region. And what I would like people to think about is the different timelines and timescales we’re embedded within, and how we’re dealing with these without even understanding them because we can barely think two generations ahead. Actually looking at the past to foresee the future is always something that I like to address with my work. So going back to the Lutetian Sea – why was Europe under the water? Because there were no ice caps. Why were there no ice caps? Because the world was a bit hotter than today. And now we’re actually reenacting the same thing at a speed which is a bit unsettling. So these pieces address all that.
The relationship between the natural world and human beings is a recurrent topic in your work.
I’ve always been very interested in expanding my studio, going outside, and seeing the world as a place where I could actually create and not just go and get an experience and then try to translate it in the studio. Today, we’re living in a world in crisis, and I think it’s very important to go back to the landscape and try to recalibrate the way we deal with it because we’re part of the world, and the world is part of us. We all know about it, but somehow for centuries we’ve been trying to extract ourselves from our surroundings. And I think that art has this power to bring us closer to the world. Also, there are a lot of things that are very abstract and I think that art touches people in another way – you can read an article or you can think about things, but art touches differently. And this type of experience is something that I want to use to pass my messages.
And how did you begin your art journey?
I began my journey in Switzerland. I was always quite interested in art and then in high school I had the chance to meet a performance artist, Massimo Furlan. At the time he was still kind of starting his career and teaching at high school, but he offered me a glimpse of what being an artist could be, because as a kid it’s rather abstract. You may understand what it is, but you don’t understand what the persona behind could be. So having this contact with him, I very quickly started to think that that would be the direction I wanted to pursue because I knew that I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to create a language, but I didn’t want to use words and I wanted to make images, and therefore I decided to study art and move to Berlin. That was around 2007, and then I had the chance to be part of what was called the Institute for Spatial Experiments, which was led by Olafur Eliasson at the time. This also had a very great impact on the way I started to engage with art as a tool, which can give us the possibility to understand the world in different ways. With art, there’s many, many lenses. But art is many lenses through which you can actually see reality. And I think that’s what moved me.
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