Elsa-Louise Manceaux — Galerie Mariane Ibrahim
At Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, French artist Elsa-Louise Manceaux, born in 1985 and based in Mexico, presents a visual reinvention of a world in constant motion.
Elsa-Louise Manceaux, Hilda Palafox — Intersections @ Mariane Ibrahim Gallery from September 3 to October 3. Learn more Her surfaces bring together layers of material, lines and shifting intensities, animated by an apparent inner urgency that moves between relief and flatness. The eye is drawn into the unruly forms and figures of a highly sensitive imaginary, where the vegetal confronts the chemical and the organic. Bodies and organs unfold with a playful, exuberant freedom, creating suspended spaces in which established hierarchies begin to collapse.
The canvas becomes an object of experimentation and a projection medium, defining space while adding a new dimension to it. Although rooted in art history, Manceaux’s practice also rethinks the function of the canvas through technology. Abstraction operates on two levels: it is both a motif and the primary effect of a given space, shifting the work away from straightforward narration. In this sense, communication, in its most fundamental and etymological sense, becomes a subject that her practice actively investigates.
And communication is precisely what is at stake here.
In a subtle condensation of ideas and forms, the exhibition draws us into the work through another kind of process. Behind a number of introductory paintings, at the heart of a radio painting, Manceaux creates a projection system that casts images onto her own works, accompanied by an audio broadcast.
The paintings stage a multifaceted encounter between spaces. There is the artist’s mental space, distributed across the different pictorial zones; the intimate space of the studio, which, as with many people, is inhabited by familiar voices from the radio, particularly the Radio France networks for French-speaking listeners. Then there is the space of research, where Manceaux multiplies forms of cross-contamination, dramatising these exchanges and dissolving boundaries by drawing one of the radio participants into a personal conversation.
The geographical dimension of her painting therefore opens up into multiple layers. Graphic, poetic, personal and material, these dimensions gradually unfold with intelligence and an irresistible sense of play.
