born in Paris in 1956

Three times the winner of the official Piccolo Spoleto USA Poster, in 1989, 2001, and 2005, Aaronson is a self-taught multimedia artist, art critic, curator, award-winning poet, published author, and performer. She also teaches French, and gives multimedia conferences on art and literature; from Corfu to Toulouse, from Colorado to Maryland and Ohio, from Lebanon, Israel to Canada, Hawai and Paris, she disseminates her thoughts and images.

Her creative journey is an adventure of the senses, a synaesthesia of energies and media…beyond frames, beyond categories. Oils, acrylics, canvas, wood, paper, found objects, watercolor, charcoal, monotype, etchings, collage, photography, ceramic, bronze casting, clay… Aaronson touches and transforms everything. She sublimates boundaries and reaches the heart of expression.

Aaronson studied history of art and art theory at the Sorbonne and L’Ecole du Louvre. In 1978 she goes to South Africa where she begins to paint and sculpt to exorcize the socio-political demons of apartheid. Her rhythmic colors vibrate, a Brücke-Cobra mix of sensations, anger, violence and organic primeval enthusiasm. She receives from the University of Cape Town her BA Honors in History of Art with a thesis on symbolism Le monde de Gustave Moreau: Symbolisme et Transcendance.

She travels a lot: Africa, the Middle East, India, Nepal, America, South America, Europe, the Caribe Islands, Iceland, Polynesia. In 1987, Aaronson finally installs herself in Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, a pediatric surgeon, and her son who is then only 3 years old.

Whilst painting and sculpting, Aaronson writes and publishes. She earns her MA in French literature from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, with a thesis on Baudelaire Le sang Baudelaire: Blessure et Hémopoiesis. Her essay Goya-Baudelaire Le grotesque existentiel wins the first prize in comparative literature studies. She pursues her artistic explorations at the first floor of the 98 Church Street. Her studio has become a palace of images where surrealism plays with expressionism. Doors, floors, and ceilings are animated with strange gazes, photographs, murals, words scattered here and there among delirious objects, it breathes a mind and a heart in ebullition.

Nurtured by Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Carlos Williams, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, the whole Spanish Generation of 27, her Baudelairian visions grow, her Rimbaldian spirit escapes to take shape in her work. Exacerbated imagination. Bosch, Goya, the Fauves, Picasso, Matissse, Modigliani, Miro, Dali, Magritte, Duchamp, Kirchner, Rotluff, Kolwitz, Soutine, Pollock, Louise Bourgeois, a crazed dance agitates her work with all the fantasmagories of the past century. Aaronson would like to “understand from the interior,” to abolish the frontiers of the possible, to kill the incarcerating logic of the academic. Positively anti-authoritarian…subversively ludic…

Always between brushes, scissors, glue, clay, lenses and pens, she directs, produces and performs in Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell for the International Festival of Poetry ERATO at the College of Charleston. For the Colloque International d’Etudes Francophones, also in Charleston, she gives life to her own poetry in a spectacle Le corps des mots, a thrombolytic collection of erotic poems sung and danced on a music she composes with the visual dimension of her work projected on the surrounding walls.

She produces and performs in another multimedia show, Respirations for the Appalachian University at Boone. She creates satirical decors for the provoking staging of Molière’s Tartuffe for the Dock Street Theatre of Charleston.

Within the movements of her creative journey Aaronson does not stop. She swims another ocean with a doctorate in comparative literature, harmonizing French, English, American, Spanish and Hebrew cultures. She earned her PhD in November 2003 with her dissertation: The Bark and the Sap A Midrashic Reading of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Presently looking for a publisher.

Her studio moves: 356 1/2 King street, an old lumber storage loft from the 19^th century. The images grow. A Dada concoction of Dolls, mannequins, glass eyes, tortoises carapaces, monkey skulls, truck coils, car engines, insects, hybrid objects, assemblages-constructions, what Aaronson calls “object-poems,” blossoming palettes with unheard saps, images not yet shored, at the edge of meeting a shape, caressed by intuition, pulsating with imagination. The studio is the interior, the matrix of creation. The studio is “l’arrivage,” the near shoring of images, the edge of birth.

At the same time, she publishes her first book Baudelaire-Miller Sexual Squalor in Paris, which she illustrates with ink drawings bursting with Millerian humor. She also publishes art reviews for Fiberart America, The Post and Courier in Charleston, interdisciplinary articles for Peace Review in England, Found Object in New York, poems for literary magazines such as Illuminations in Scotland, and Deus Loci in Baltimore, and scholarly essays for the Encyclopedia of 20^th century Jewish Writers. Her art work is chosen to make the cover of Tessera, a book published in Canada, Blood- Le sang, published in 2003 by the Women’s Press of Toronto, which also contains two of her photographs and two of her poems. Her ink drawings can also be seen in Sirena, an interdisciplinary magazine published by Johns Hopkins University,

In 2000, Aaronson exhibited her work in Lebanon, at the Beyrut International Contemporary Art Salon, and in France, at the Strasbourg International Contemporary Art fair, known as the F.I.A.C. In January 2001 Aaronson inaugurated the Miami Art Fair with a performance of Baudelaire’s, Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s poetry, alongside her own poetry, together with a presentation of her synaesthetic collages. In July of the same year, she exhibited her multimedia work at the Pierre Cardin Art Foundation at the Chateau de Sade in Provence, In October 2001 she participated in the International Fair of Contemporary Art of La Bastille, in Paris, and in 2003, she exhibited her work at the April Salon of Contemporary Art of Montrouge, near Paris. In 2005, her collages were exhibited in Paris, at the Galerie de L’Europe, 55 rue de Seine. She is presently preparing a major show for the 2006 International Fair of Contemporary Art in Lyon.

Whatever Aaronson does, the image is the heartbeat of her identity. Multiple and “polypetal,” the image is dug within the core of being, harnessed within the energies of becoming. Images breathe life because the image is skin…Art: To nurture the skin so it does not die… To renew the saps. Whether paint on canvas, paper collages, sculptures, poem-objects, words, music, the image is a memory, yesterday’s memory, today’s memory, tomorrow’s memory… never ceasing to ask questions… flying away with colors, forms, words, music… breaking the monolithic power of absolute answers, fighting dogmas, killing pre-conceived, accepted ideas…No style, but a ceaseless search. She ventures inside to remove herself from time…A walking memory… A memory of the senses…within and out of time…

Corporate Collections

In Charleston, SC, USA

Rapid Granulators

Southern Bell

Trident Tec. College

Hollings Cancer Center

Medical University of South Carolina

Mark Tanenbaum Law offices

Private Collections

Argentina

Canada

Denmark

France

Israel

Italy

South Africa

Spain

Sweden

U.S.A: Atlanta, Baltimore, Charleston, Columbia, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Indiana.

BEA AARONSON

Three times the official Piccolo Spoleto Poster artist, in 1989, 2001, and 2005, Béa Aaronson is a French-American multimedia artist, a published poet and author, and lecturer, who lives and works both in Charleston and Paris.

In 2000, Aaronson exhibited her work in Lebanon, at the Beyrouth International Contemporary Art Salon, and in France at the Strasbourg International Contemporary Art fair, the celebrated F.I.A.C.

In 2001, she inaugurated the Miami Art Fair with a multimedia performance of her synaesthetic laminated collages, and exhibited her multimedia work with Pierre Cardin at the Chateau de Sade in Provence.

In 2002, she participated in the International Contemporary Art Fair of La Bastille in Paris.

In 2003, she was chosen to participate in the acclaimed Salon d’Art Contemporain de Montrouge, near Paris.