Émilie Picard. What's left over?

About

Emilie Picard’s delicate paintings show pastel-coloured debris in the form of artefacts, empty balloons, old pipes and cables, as well as fake plants and parasols. As an ensemble, the individual objects seem as if they had been forgotten or temporarily stored somewhere and now, freed from their actual function, want to tell us a story – almost like on a stage. The artist clearly borrows from classical still-life paintings from art history, especially its vanitas motifs, but she hijacks them with a sense of humour, bringing together totally heterogeneous elements on the same canvas. Picard’s pictorial universe is always riddled with white, crumbling cracks that affect the view and give the impression that the painting itself is in the process of collapsing. This decay effect is also illustrated by some references to antique wall paintings that time has partially amputated. Her work stimulates the viewer’s imagination and invites them to question the process of disappearing images. What then is left? In dialogue with her painting, Emilie Picard presents a series of frames in which she seems to give in to the random and abstract. In reality, it is with the rigor of an archaeologist that she records and assembles the relics of her paintings, like a puzzle to be reassembled.