Cindy Choisy: the Caribbean on canvas
In our series on the painters of Saint-Martin, this week we meet Cindy Choisy, a unique artist whose works weave a thread between ancestral memory, cosmology and island modernity. A discreet yet passionate creator, who has turned upcycling and recycling into an aesthetic in its own right.
She speaks softly, choosing her words with care. Born to two teachers, Cindy Choisy grew up in a home where learning and intellectual curiosity were central to family life. Behind her reserved nature lies a woman for whom nothing really suggested she would become a painter. After embarking on a scientific course of study with great dedication, she made a decisive change of direction and enrolled at a school of applied arts in Paris. It was a conscious decision to break with the past. She graduated with a degree in fashion design, textile design and pattern-making, equipped with a keen eye for materials and forms — and a dual scientific and artistic background that would leave a lasting mark on her practice. Then came the return. A return to her roots, to her family, to Saint-Martin where she grew up.
Painting as a natural choice
“I started painting canvases to decorate the house because I couldn’t find what I wanted…” she confides frankly. What was meant to be a simple practical solution became a deeply personal revelation. “In the end, painting really got under my skin.” In 2007, she held her first exhibition. The public discovered an artist already fully inspired, whose world draws from the sources of world cultures — with a particular fascination for ethnic heritages, especially Native American and Caribbean, but also for the major religions and their symbols. Cindy Choisy draws upon human beliefs as shared languages. What guides her above all is a fascination with roots—cultural, spiritual and emotional.
Beliefs put to the test of the contemporary world
Her gaze does not stop at the earth. It rises to the stars, cosmology, and the celestial cycles that have guided navigators, shamans and astronomers across all civilisations. In her works, the cosmos responds to earthly beliefs. “I have thought a great deal about Caribbean identity,” she says simply. “We are the ancestors of tomorrow”: this conviction runs through every one of her canvases and gives them a rare, almost universal significance. Her practice is as diverse as her inspiration. Paintings on canvas, on fabric, rust prints, symbols borrowed from everyday images — everything becomes material to explore. But where Cindy Choisy truly surprises is in her ability to bring together this ancestral heritage and a modernity in constant flux. She incorporates printed circuits into her works, integrating contemporary mechanical representations, as if to remind us that today’s human beings remain, despite everything, connected to the same fundamental questions as yesterday. Today, Cindy Choisy is refocusing her work and considering presenting a comprehensive collection of her pieces — a striking panorama, an invitation to journey with her through this ongoing dialogue between heaven and earth, between memory and the future.
