Elsa Dray-Farges
Born in 1985, graduated from ENSAAMA in Paris in 2006, and from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2009, Elsa Dray-Farges has since developed a colorful, joyful work, always borrowed from a certain melancholy.
Manifesto
A step into a dark and flowery clearing, an abyssal swamp filled with frightened creatures, a village without gravity with colorful stairs. Melancholic beings with dancing bodies, frightened, happy, sad faces. The characters and masks that I create hybridize the human and the animal thus composing a gallery of dreamlike and nightmarish portraits evoking fantastic creatures.
My creations alternate flat surface and volume in order to achieve a permanent and living movement between these two dimensions. I imagine an existence for my characters by making them a face, a body, a costume, sometimes a habitat. I then manage to converse with them, look at them, touch them and tame them. I create surreal environments in which they evolve. These are imagined in the melancholy and strange continuity of their aspect: a distorted and disturbing universe that I transpose into architectures in volumes evoking an endless wandering, like a labyrinthine dream. My creatures are a free assembly of imaginary and recognizable forms. By moving away from the human form, I try to get closer to the burlesque and tragic aspect of the emotions that animate and cross us more precisely.
I use papier mâché, a modest and imperfect material, allowing me to model and transcribe volumes in a fluid way. Through this organic process, my universe seems to gradually unfold spontaneously under my fingers and as the layers of paper accumulate. The common thread of my work is to materialize a dimension parallel to our world, in which my characters translate our forbidden emotions in a burlesque and multicolored form. They twist and grimace, distorting reality, expressing the unspeakable, formalizing our most extreme fears and thus allowing catharsis.
By working on the mask, I focus attention on the expressions of my characters and transpose them to a human scale, inviting them to be worn. Their development involves an accumulation of material and a meticulous transformation of surfaces. I seek to create a tension between the bright colors that I use and the worried expressions of my creations.
The carnival masks and cartoons of Tex Avery influence me daily in my practice. The grotesque, wacky and distorted expressions, bodies and faces are both uplifting and harrowing. In its two forms, life and death hold hands, drama and humor live together in the same world. By giving them this monstrous and colorful aspect, I try to materialize this border where joy and tragedy coexist perpetually, opposing a wise and uniform representation of society.
My drawings transcribe the imaginary world that I produce in volume. It allows me to explore my ideas from another angle, more immediately and without technical constraints. It is also closely linked to a very strong appetite for color. I like to mix different graphic tools on the same surface and look for vibrations between colors and their textures. I play with very dark tints to bring out the luminosity of a color. I try to keep my forms free and spontaneous, without freezing my subjects to then breathe the same vital energy into my sculptures.
This round trip breathes life into my daily practice and makes volume and drawing function like communicating vessels. The fascination and obsession with creating characters in volume stems in part from the discovery of American animation films of the 90s made in stop-motion with modeling clay: those of Garri Bardine (The Wolf and the Little Riding Hood rouge) and early shorts by Wallace and Gromit. By appearing on the screen, these imaginary characters seem to pierce reality. They are made of material, texture, shine, strange coloring. They dance and move like animated sculptures. Since watching them, I have never stopped wanting to create my own characters telling the stories that inhabited me.
Among my influences, the freedom of Quentin Blake's drawings made a deep impression on me. The lightness, movement and apparent imperfection of his line are immensely expressive. These drawings encouraged me to integrate clumsiness into my work in order to retain the spontaneity of the first gesture in the final sculpture or drawing. The amazing diversity of Tomi Ungerer's work has been a fundamental inspiration in my journey. His tender and sharp spirit as well as his virtuosity in grasping all the supports overwhelms me. Death and violence are very present in his work, especially in his children's books. He likes to repeat that it is "essential to traumatize children so that they can face life with their identity". For me, Tomi Ungerer has perfectly captured in his work the constant cohabitation between utter tragedy and burlesque.
“The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro the monsters arise.” Quote from Antonio Gramsci in Prison Notebooks.
Exhibitions
2022 • Quintal : Exposition collective « Le Bouquet »
2020-2021 • Anyway Galerie
2019 • Librairie Artazart
2019 • Galerie Joyce Paris - exposition Bensimon
2016 • Galerie Antonine Catzéflis
2010 • Galerie Plaatsmaken à Arnhem (Pays-Bas)
Contact
elsadrayfarges@gmail.com
+33 (0)6 51 82 26 02
ATELIER COMMODE
9 rue Francisco Ferrer
93100 Montreuil
Collaborations
Hermès
Bonpoint
Aecis
Télérama
Frédéric Malle
Tommy Hilfiger
Press
Télérama / Milk Magazine (French edition) / Day Off Mag / Kid's Magazine / Kid's Wear Magazine (german edition) / Grazia Casa (italian edition) / Glamour (dutch edition) / Elle Décoration (dutch edition), Psychologie magazine (France) / Papier mâché magazine (australian edition)
About
Born in 1985, graduated from ENSAAMA in Paris in 2006, and from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2009, Elsa Dray-Farges has since developed a colorful, joyful work, always borrowed from a certain melancholy.
Manifesto
A step into a dark and flowery clearing, an abyssal swamp filled with frightened creatures, a village without gravity with colorful stairs. Melancholic beings with dancing bodies, frightened, happy, sad faces. The characters and masks that I create hybridize the human and the animal thus composing a gallery of dreamlike and nightmarish portraits evoking fantastic creatures.
My creations alternate flat surface and volume in order to achieve a permanent and living movement between these two dimensions. I imagine an existence for my characters by making them a face, a body, a costume, sometimes a habitat. I then manage to converse with them, look at them, touch them and tame them. I create surreal environments in which they evolve. These are imagined in the melancholy and strange continuity of their aspect: a distorted and disturbing universe that I transpose into architectures in volumes evoking an endless wandering, like a labyrinthine dream. My creatures are a free assembly of imaginary and recognizable forms. By moving away from the human form, I try to get closer to the burlesque and tragic aspect of the emotions that animate and cross us more precisely.
I use papier mâché, a modest and imperfect material, allowing me to model and transcribe volumes in a fluid way. Through this organic process, my universe seems to gradually unfold spontaneously under my fingers and as the layers of paper accumulate. The common thread of my work is to materialize a dimension parallel to our world, in which my characters translate our forbidden emotions in a burlesque and multicolored form. They twist and grimace, distorting reality, expressing the unspeakable, formalizing our most extreme fears and thus allowing catharsis.
By working on the mask, I focus attention on the expressions of my characters and transpose them to a human scale, inviting them to be worn. Their development involves an accumulation of material and a meticulous transformation of surfaces. I seek to create a tension between the bright colors that I use and the worried expressions of my creations.
The carnival masks and cartoons of Tex Avery influence me daily in my practice. The grotesque, wacky and distorted expressions, bodies and faces are both uplifting and harrowing. In its two forms, life and death hold hands, drama and humor live together in the same world. By giving them this monstrous and colorful aspect, I try to materialize this border where joy and tragedy coexist perpetually, opposing a wise and uniform representation of society.
My drawings transcribe the imaginary world that I produce in volume. It allows me to explore my ideas from another angle, more immediately and without technical constraints. It is also closely linked to a very strong appetite for color. I like to mix different graphic tools on the same surface and look for vibrations between colors and their textures. I play with very dark tints to bring out the luminosity of a color. I try to keep my forms free and spontaneous, without freezing my subjects to then breathe the same vital energy into my sculptures.
This round trip breathes life into my daily practice and makes volume and drawing function like communicating vessels. The fascination and obsession with creating characters in volume stems in part from the discovery of American animation films of the 90s made in stop-motion with modeling clay: those of Garri Bardine (The Wolf and the Little Riding Hood rouge) and early shorts by Wallace and Gromit. By appearing on the screen, these imaginary characters seem to pierce reality. They are made of material, texture, shine, strange coloring. They dance and move like animated sculptures. Since watching them, I have never stopped wanting to create my own characters telling the stories that inhabited me.
Among my influences, the freedom of Quentin Blake's drawings made a deep impression on me. The lightness, movement and apparent imperfection of his line are immensely expressive. These drawings encouraged me to integrate clumsiness into my work in order to retain the spontaneity of the first gesture in the final sculpture or drawing. The amazing diversity of Tomi Ungerer's work has been a fundamental inspiration in my journey. His tender and sharp spirit as well as his virtuosity in grasping all the supports overwhelms me. Death and violence are very present in his work, especially in his children's books. He likes to repeat that it is "essential to traumatize children so that they can face life with their identity". For me, Tomi Ungerer has perfectly captured in his work the constant cohabitation between utter tragedy and burlesque.
“The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro the monsters arise.” Quote from Antonio Gramsci in Prison Notebooks.
Exhibitions
2022 • Quintal : Exposition collective « Le Bouquet »
2020-2021 • Anyway Galerie
2019 • Librairie Artazart
2019 • Galerie Joyce Paris - exposition Bensimon
2016 • Galerie Antonine Catzéflis
2010 • Galerie Plaatsmaken à Arnhem (Pays-Bas)
Collaborations
Hermès
Bonpoint
Aecis
Télérama
Frédéric Malle
Tommy Hilfiger
Press
Télérama / Milk Magazine (French edition) / Day Off Mag / Kid's Magazine / Kid's Wear Magazine (german edition) / Grazia Casa (italian edition) / Glamour (dutch edition) / Elle Décoration (dutch edition), Psychologie magazine (France) / Papier mâché magazine (australian edition)
Contact
elsadrayfarges@gmail.com
+33 (0)6 51 82 26 02
ATELIER COMMODE
9 rue Francisco Ferrer
93100 Montreuil