“Emmanuelle Villard is a painter, and what she paints is almost always pictures [tableaux]. To besure, they are not necessarily flat rectangular panels, as tradition would have it, but they are invariably unusual objects, designed to catch the eye and focus the attention for a period of time that it is up to each viewer to determine. Otherwise put, we can carry on calling them pictures in a day and age when painting occurs in accordance with broadened forms and in an expanded field. We might even say that the three-dimensional objects, be they placed or hung, which she has been producing since 2004-2005, calling them Visual Objects [Objets visuels], are as much pictures as sculptures, because what matters in them is, first and foremost, the coloured surface. Her oeuvre is deeply rooted in the 1990s, a decade which saw the emergence of a practice of abstraction combining the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s, which emphasized the material process of picture making, and the legacy of the 1980s, which recognized that an iconic dimension was unavoidable, that everything in a picture had to be perceived as an image, including that material process (a drop of paint has become the image of a drop of paint). Her work has since developed in an autonomous way, not without linking up with and anticipating the issues more generally raised by the art world of the 2000s, especially those which take into account a play activity aspect and a new way of artistically grasping the questions raised by recent trends in women’s studies.” [Éric de Chassey, extract]
Published on the occasion of exhibitions Emmanuelle Villard, Artifici finti #1, galerie Les filles du calvaire, 2011-2012, and Artifici finti #2, abbaye de Maubuisson, 2012. A coproduction with Conseil général du Val-d’Oise and galerie les filles du calvaire, with the support Alain le Provost and Georges Bessière.
Authors : Éric de Chassey, Guillaume Benoit.
Description : 19 x 24 cm, 160 pages, paperback.
Languages : french, english.
Date of publication : May 2012.
Isbn : 978-2-35864-034-3.
Public price : 32 €.
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