Audrey Nervi — Dead or Alive — Eva Hober Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 7 → October 12, 2013

Audrey Nervi (Lyon, 1974) continues her pictorial dialogue with today’s world. It is a world that she observes attentively from its outskirts, from its countries in debt, degraded by the authorities of international finance, a world that is being bankrupt, but she also observes from zones of temporary occupation where alternative worlds are being thought out and invented.

She brings back numerous photographs from her wanderings, as well as documents that relate to her personal life and more broadly are testimonies of some of today’s communities and ways of life. Through painting, she seizes again the moments she experienced and loads them up with meaning, beyond the anecdotal and the picturesque, she turns her characters into emblems and her scenes into symbols, mainly of the widespread crisis. Through the connections she operates between her paintings, using the method of cinematographic sequences, it is narrations that are being initiated, for example by way of mirror constructions: a half beached ship is mirrored by a fragile craft that sails on the horizon; a makeshift shelter built in a meadow is having a conversation with three characters sleeping on a sofa, covered with a big piece of fabric.

Where are we more sheltered today, inside or outside? And what world do we have to hide in, even when inside? These are some of the questions directed at the viewer by these works that represent reality with emotions, criticism and worry being injected into them. The touch developed by the artist has probably a lot to do with it as it wraps everything in a soft blur, that of memory, or distance maybe, it is in any case that of a strangeness that goes way beyond a simple reproduction. Such is the link that is being woven painting after painting, by way of the painting that occupies Audrey Nervi as much as she occupies it.