Peinture, arsenic et vieilles dentelles — Les filles du calvaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 4 → October 25, 2014

As a painter, Emmanuelle Villard cherishes practicing and experiments, her favorite “pattern” implies seduction but also an ambivalent look on her surroundings. She goes to and fro between the medium’s seduction, the painting itself that attracts us and a feminity that has something a little lurid in itself. In her work, one doesn’t exist without the other, each leading to the discovery of those two other aspects.

Far from the less is more aesthetics, with many allusive elements, she forces the viewer to deal with an extreme universe where painting is garnished with surface reflections, glitters, pearls, strass and other trinkets, thus creating mixed feelings deeply rooted in each of us. She seduces, surprises, shocks, flirts with, entices, and catches our eyes while rejecting our attention at the same time.

It has to do with spectacle and acting. Nothing odd then when Emmanuelle Villard starts working on a show called Objet Spectacle in which she develops her pictorial materials. This project, recently presented in the MAC/VAL, will be shown as the reopening of her exhibition the first Saturday of October. The other pieces in Painting, arsenic and old lace(s) echo this production. One can find two new series of paintings : Levés de rideaux (Pulling the curtain), an evocation of the stage and of Parrhasius curtain, facing her Scènes de crime (Crime scenes) in which laces, pearl necklaces and drapery seem riddled with bullet holes in a narrative dimension since the crime subject would be both feminity and painting. Some Medley enriched with shells and pompoms, some Lace paintings, with an air of Spanish mantillas, as well as her collages excessively saturated complete this body of works.

A thread can be woven between the broidered mount and the lace-canvas to bring in mind the arachnidan idea of imprisoning our gaze and capturing thousands of pearls and painted diamonds, glues or fixed on the painting. A provocatively dangerous tendency, between baroc and arsenic, that paves the way to themes and titles such as Crime scenes or Lace, whose ambiguity provides for our thrill of captive seduction.