Artist Statement

"The things that one sees, when one looks at my artwork, are the colors. In facts, using paint, pencil, pastel and collage I build up my work. I use whatever comes to my mind and help me to achieve the texture and the effect that will catch the eye. I work with series, different themes appear in all of them but I have a recurrent preoccupation. Relationships between a couple, a family, with nature, with animals and the homeland.

What interests me is to play with the materiality of the painting and to question it. Paint? Fabric? Paper? Desires... What do the clothes reveal? What are they hiding? Don't the clothes reveal more than they hide? The painter dresses in a smock, artist shows himself on the canvas and the woman becomes the artist. Colors and form take the stage.

What discloses the artist? What hushes the artist? The woman hangs the laundry. loses the thread of one's thoughts. Private space, intimacy. No make-up. The woman chooses a dress, a nice dress, she presents herself at her best. Game of hide-and-seek between the woman who recalls being a little girl and a little girl whopretends to be a lady. She borrows high heel shoes and glossy material dresses. Fabrics tangle together, social fabrics and the multicolor fabric of the disguise and the roll of fabrics primed ready to be painted over. Is the canvas fixed up on the stretcher not only the back of a stage set?

In this 'mise en abime' other questions appear, the words are weaving the woof of a discourse but don't we say a tissue of lies? It is in this constant questioning, the tension between reality, private life, life and art, that the public answer lays."

Exhibitions

Josette Simon-Gestin

Recent Works: Lorient Express

February 5th – 28th, 2010

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Selected Works

Pas Perdus #10
mixed media on paper, 20 x 27 inches