Emerging Selection 2010: French painter Florence Reymond
French Painter
Born in September 1971 in France
Lives and works in Paris
@Galerie Odile Ouizeman
in this post find:
1/ “Florence REYMOND : a Storyteller” by Beatrice Chassepot
2/ Interview of the artist
no title – 2009
Oil on canvas 200 x 200 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Odile Ouizeman
Fric Freaks – 2010
mixte technique on paper
49 x 70 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Odile Ouizeman
Florence REYMOND : a Storyteller” by Beatrice Chassepot
Florence is a painter who likes to draw us into her stories. One could say she is like a Storyteller who displays her chapters in layers on the canvas. She extracts some clues from each layer and highlight it on the front to help the understanding of the viewer. It could sound confusing but there is no confusion between those clues, she is an expert in composing, building a story. She knows how to find lots of interesting chapters to build a very good story/painting with interesting multiple entries. To pursue the literature comparison she composes her paintings the same way Tony Morison builds her stories.
Oil on canvas
courtesy the artist and Galerie Odile Ouizeman
Let’s take the example above. We can see a girl on left whose body belongs to two different times of the story as two different times on the canvas:
Her upper body is very lightly painted, like erased. It is part of the background , like if it is an old story that happened a long time ago. Her lower part, on the contrary, is clearly painted and we can easily recognize it. It is on the foreground on the canvas and therefore it is part of a recent part of the story.
It suggests to different times for a same character. Those two times are multiplied by the artist as much as she wants to, proceeding the same for each character or item on the canvas.
We could say Florence Reymond creates a new notion of perspective on the canvas that we could called “temporal perspective”
Consequently, the traditional “pictorial perspective” -the architectural one, that gives deepness, backgrounds and foregrounds- is not anymore the only one on the canvas. It cohabits with the temporal one.
The whole, made of the two perspectives and the different clues, makes a very deep and meaningful painting. It suggests many different ways to read the painting.
As I said at the beginning, she is as complex as novelist Toni Morrison….
L’arbre magique “Magical tree” – 2009
Oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Odile Ouizeman
Concerning those topics, so strong topics we can see in Florence’s paintings, I asked to her where she found them. Here are the answers:
FLORENCE REYMOND INTERVIEW
B.Ch – Is the topic the most important to start a painting or not only?
Florence REYMOND: – First I have like hazy thoughts in mind, that turn more precise because I see many images from different sources that I compare. Actually, this work is not really conscious. “Florence Reymond’s paintings look like genuine but it hides the dark part of them. Some acid colors, some details pretty well drawn with an oily chalk are cleraly part of childhood but some dripping faces or erased faces are unconscious, like they have disappeared in the limbo of old souvenirs. On the surface of the canvas we see some images like retinal spasms more than images for real. This process of painting was used by the Surrealists who wanted to produce a stimulating “superior vision”.
André Breton was talking about “melting conscious and unconscious to find a surrealism way” Alexandra Fau
In each painting I rebuild a world like a puzzle made of different images to create a special atmosphere, between fairy-tale and barbarian. This is the reason we see all together joyful scenes, bands, majorettes mix with tortured bodies, crippled corpses. It appears like “alive images of death.” This is an ambiguous word in which you can find sacred and profane and a world that can slip into horror. There are also references to the great Masters like Manet, Goya. It is a nod in the direction of the Masters that gives more ambiguity and also a healthy distance.Beatrice Chassepot for be-Art,
No title – 2010
mixte technique on paper – 21 x 27 cm
courtesy the artist and Galerie Odile Ouizeman
