Eva Jospin, the French cardboard artist that captured Dior and champagne-makers Ruinart

French artist Eva Jospin brings Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle on a journey inside her cardboard creations – refined, enigmatic and sensitive – that carry viewers away into a strange and magical universe, as if they have wandered inside a fairy tale

Eva Jospin crafts hauntingly beautiful forests, rocks, grottoes, nymphaeums, cenotaphs, temples and entire universes out of cardboard, a cheap, everyday material that she sublimates through the ambition of the form and the complexity of the ornamentation.

Going from the minute to the monumental, the painstaking, delicate details of her sculptures, usually found in drawing or lacemaking, contrast with their oversized dimensions.

Having studied mannerist Renaissance gardens and landscape paintings and deeply influenced by the art of the Antiquity, the Baroque era, the Rococo spirit or the 19th century and its panoramas, the Paris-born artist’s fantastical woods are those of fairy tales yet are devoid of human presence.

Dense, silent, obscure, full of mystery and the unknown, they possess the power of suggestion and are spaces of transition from reality to dream.

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Galleria exhibition at Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris in 2021-22.

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Eva Jospin at the Folie exhibition at Domaine de Chaumont-sur- Loire in France in 2018.

Eva Jospin Cardboard Art

By representing objects with multiple symbolism in the collective unconscious, Eva entices viewers to plunge into her immersive surrealist landscapes that are places of infinite possibilities, while leaving them open to interpretation so audiences can compose their own narratives at the same time.

“I want people to join me,” she states. “I’d like people to appropriate my artwork by going into their own imagination and make the links to a lot of different things.”

Eva Jospin's world of Cardboard

Inviting us to embark on an introspective voyage, her romantic, poetic scenes are the ideal backdrop for our mental projections in which we can imagine infinite secret stories unfolding.

“To me, the role of the artist is to create a world of its own, a real universe, and to invite viewers to take part with their eyes and their mind,” Eva discloses.

“I invite viewers to project themselves into my world of cardboard, cement or textile and to foster their imagination. I like the idea that my forests or landscapes initiate immediate emotions inside people because it’s something that anyone can easily relate to.

My vision is to activate this link between the art and the public, to create something that is accessible. My artworks are not political but emotional. My works full of narratives, in which nature is revealed to be other and different, engage us to re-enchant our relationship with the world.

Silent and sensitive, these composite sceneries, where vegetal, mineral and built elements are mixed, invite us to meditate, dream and take time, salutary, for contemplation.”

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Eva was invited by French champagne label Ruinart for a series of cardboard installations.

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Eva images a rocky outcrop on a barren universe for her project.

Eva Jospin Background

Born in Paris in 1975, Eva is the daughter of former French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. “I’m from a generation when children still had a lot of freedom, were free to move around,” she recalls.

“I went to school alone at six years old and could walk around the city. For a while, it was full of children everywhere because people were just letting them go out before they started to be scared for a lot of reasons.”

A graduate of the School of Fine Arts of Paris in 2002, she made cardboard her material of predilection because of its simplicity and easy availability.

Eva Jospin for Dior

The original use of this material brought her recognition over a decade ago, and has since led to installations of her work in the square courtyard of the Louvre Museum, at Dior’s haute couture and ready-to-wear fashion shows, at the Beaupassage gastronomic hotspot in Paris and in the gardens of the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire château in central France.

In Eva’s hands, cardboard is sliced, cut, folded, sanded, superimposed or juxtaposed in countless layers to create volume and perspective, magically transformed into bark, vine, rock, stone or brick.

She explains, “I really love to work with this material because I can express in the work a lot of different moments. Sometimes I do huge pieces with rocks and I can be very messy with everything everywhere, and then I do things in fragility and meticulousness.”

Whereas in the creative process, cardboard is generally meant to be eliminated – used as a sketch or support to prepare for a nobler material – she chooses to exalt it, expressing herself through its texture.

Eva Jospin Cardboard Sculptures

“I think in layers and stratification – it’s really the way I construct the works – and cardboard is also made of layers,” Eva remarks.

“It’s the shadow and light on a piece that will make you feel the shape of the sculpture, and cardboard contains its own shadow, so when you use cardboard in an art piece, you will have a constant vibration that is impossible to recreate with something flat.

If you sand it, you will erase the holes so it’s flat and it’s like using white, and then you will carve it to have more shadow. There are a lot of ways to transform the material. It’s fascinating because you start doing things with it and then you realise all the possible variations with the exact same thing.”

Art of illusion

As Eva is a master of the art of illusion, what appears to be a cave strewn with vegetation is actually an outsized sculpture in moulded cement of her own construction with interiors decorated with red stones, lightly tinted shells, gossamer paper garlands, gilded inlays and bas-reliefs carved in stone – a retreat in which to meditate away from the world.

Marrying fact and fiction, she can fuse real elements of an existing architecture with an imagined vision of a palace, temple or garden, creating self-contained worlds, where epics, fables and myths materialise.

Or build a complicated assembly of architectural shapes and vegetal fragments that appear to be the result of grafts or unexpected hybridisations. “It’s a way to erase what’s the end of the man and what’s the end of nature because there is an encounter and something is mixed,” she notes.

Eva Jospin Paris Studio

A single artwork may take months to come to life, with the help of five permanent skilled assistants in Eva’s Paris studio, which expands temporarily if the project requires.

“I need to have a strong desire for what I do because it’s a long process, it’s not immediate and I’m slow,” she concludes.

“Probably for most artists, there is something absolutely fascinating about making things that are not there. There is nothing and then we make something – it’s magical. It’s also why we create so much stuff and it’s a big problem, but it’s an urge we have, something deeply human, to need to fabricate things.

My dream for the future is to create an artist’s garden like the one Niki de Saint Phalle did in Italy. I’m crossing my fingers that someone will commission me to make sculptures for such a garden.”

Ruinart Eva Jospin Carte Blanche 2023

Handpicked by Ruinart as its Carte Blanche 2023 artist, Eva has created an installation of cardboard sculptures, hauts- reliefs, embroideries and drawings centred around a carmontelle, an 18th-century invention for showing landscape paintings in motion by French dramatist, painter and designer Louis Carrogis Carmontelle.

Composed of a long scroll of paper stretched between two cylinders, the images unfurl with the turn of a small crank.

Recalling her discovery of Ruinart’s historic site and the terroir of the Montagne de Reims, her intricate drawing on paper narrates the connections between the underground worlds of the chalk pits and vineyards, between nature and architecture, and between the gestures in an artist’s workshop and during the champagne-making process, from pruning the vines to riddling the bottles.

Ruinart Cellars

Investigations of a region in miniature, Eva’s Chefs-d’oeuvre, or masterpieces, juxtapose representations of natural scenery with architectural forms, even including a tiny sculpted staircase echoing the steps descending to Ruinart’s cellars where its bottles age.

Hauts-reliefs evoking the forest bordering Ruinart’s Taissy vineyard suggest a passage from the roots to the vines, and from subterranean spaces to above ground, while her silk embroideries hand-sewn by Mumbai-based Chanakya atelier (the very same used by Dior) reveal multicoloured, surreal landscapes, and her undulating relief drawings in ink on Japanese paper reference the site’s topography.

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