A silhouette is a shape that stands out on a different colored background. It gives a look or the general line of a being. The features are not entirely defined. The proportions are not always respected. However, the essence of this person, the intention of his movement are reproduced. It is within this framework that the exhibition "Silhouette" at the Géraldine Banier Gallery brings together three women artists whose sure gesture creates figures with blurred contours, faces without features with a lively expression: Christelle Leloup, (Fr.) embroiderer, Sylvie Mangaud, (Fr.) sculptor and René Romero Schuler, (USA) painter. Each of them puts at the heart of her work the use of the material beyond the formal aspect to create the right emotion, to capture the substance of the being they have chosen to share with us.
After a dark period for painting, where the sentence "of its death” spread from West to East, a new freedom of expression of this medium was born, notably the abstract figuration. It is in this pictorial current that René Romero Schuler's work fits. Freed from the constraints of detail, which locked her in an obsessive dissatisfaction, René created a space for dialogue with the material. She thus explores a meditative and free creative process, where her palette knives are guided by the paint. Her canvases leave the viewer free to appropriate the story that is told to them, to make it their own and to continue it in a new inner and personal dialogue.
We find these relationships, of intimacy with the material and freedom of form, in the work of Sylvie Mangaud. The exploration of the body is built on the will of the artist to express an emotion, or to capture a gesture. For this, certain lines of the body are accentuated or stretched, the details of the faces are blurred and the outline of the sculptures is frayed by the knife work. It seems that their presence is increased tenfold, that these women will laugh, or that this cheetah will continue its nonchalant walk.
Embroiderer of the Vernoux workshop, Christelle Leloup has been sampling for Haute Couture since 2014. It is with the complicity of her friend, Sylvie Mangaud, that she explores her sculpture sketches. Silk, or gold threads have taken hold of the fine lines of Fragile, Destiny and Zeus, and there is a joyful, mischievous air left by her haloed thread strokes around the embroidery.
These silhouettes, captured by the talent of those women, are alive and well.