Fantasia, 2018-2022

Technique: acrylics and oil on canvas
Exhibition available in 2 formats for outdoor use and 1 format for indoor use.

Armelle de Sainte Marie is pursuing three pictorial series: Odyssey (the largest in number of works, since 2009), Traverses (since 2011) and Hybrid Vanities (since 2016). Each of these series unfolds in a specific approach to painting, in three complementary paths although they may seem contradictory.

The majority of Fantasia 's works fall under the category of hybrid vanitas . In the vocabulary of Fine Arts, a vanitas is a pictorial representation evoking the precariousness of life and the futility of human occupations.

Armelle de Sainte Marie's Hybrids are like portraits, unsettling "world-pebbles", hesitating between reality and dream, which the artist declares to extract from the abstract, fluid and aquatic landscapes of the Odysseys ; paintings which are all " a rush of traces, patterns and forms / muddy, cottony masses / filaments and twists / deliquescent aggregates / rotting strips / intermingling of strata / indissociation of surfaces "... The Odysseys are as sumptuous as they are disturbing in the willful indecision between form and formlessness, between what could begin to be but which never materializes, between matter and image, one never winning over the other.

As if in counterpoint to this unleashing that the canvas struggles to contain, the Hybrid Vanities show closed forms floating in the center of a background painted in flat colors. The artist starts from the observation of existing rocks that she transforms by analogy: there like a budding mushroom, there like a slightly grotesque tissue of flesh, there again like a micro-vegetal landscape, a shell, a bone whose nature we do not fully recognize. The pictorial problem becomes that of arrangement: how do we move from one surface to another? How do these surfaces confront each other, oppose each other, link and agglomerate and, therefore, how do they (co)exist?