Four Hands, One Canvas
To create with four hands, is to accept the other artist’s intervention, shifting a form, covering a line, or leading the work into unexpected territory..
Sophie Sainrapt and Emmanuelle Renard have an intimate understanding of each other’s practice. When they work on the same piece, each brings her own gestures, figures and colours, yet neither retains control of the composition. The work unfolds through a series of responses : one form calls forth another, a figure emerges from the background, a line contradicts and then extends the gesture that came before.
From this creative interplay, alive with energy and sensuality, emerges a shared creation, shaped by metamorphoses and chance, a third artistic language that can no more be attributed to one than to the other.
Two artistic universes in dialogue
Emmanuelle Renard constructs a painting in absolute freedom, intensely barbaric and luminous. The enchanted existence, crossed by the plant, the animal and the appearance of strange figures have all the rights. Matter always seems to be moving, life exults. The shapes are transformed, come together or fall apart, as if the painting were a world crossed by archaic forces, still forming.
Sophie SAINRAPT has always placed the female body at the center of its work. His drawing, free and immediately recognizable, explores sensuality, desire and the power of life. His figures impose themselves without excessive caution : they fully inhabit space and claim their freedom.
In Barroco, these two writings meet without confusing each other. The bodies of Sophie Sainrapt mingle with the wild worlds of Emmanuelle Renard. Humans dialogue with animals, the plant becomes carnal and improbable creatures appear in an explosion of colors.
Barroco : a reinvented baroque
The title of the exhibition naturally evokes the baroque, his taste for movement, the excess, the metamorphoses and abundant compositions. Yet, the artists offer neither a scholarly quotation nor a reconstruction. Barroco rather designates a freedom taken with forms and rules.
Nothing is perfectly stable : the characters transform, the scales become blurred and the natural elements seem to have a life of their own. The grotesque rubs shoulders with the sublime, anxiety meets humor and sensuality arises at the heart of the fantastic.
Painted on paper, the works combine oil, ink, pastel and water games. Overlays, erasures and redoes make their creative process visible. The surface preserves the memory of the dialogue between the two artists : his agreements, its resistances and its happy accidents.
A world of chimeras and metamorphoses
The exhibition takes the visitor into a fertile universe, crossed by women, birds, fabulous animals, foliage and shapes that are difficult to name. The living overflows, produces metamorphoses, unexpected connections and sometimes delicious monsters.
This profusion, the brilliance of the colors and the exuberance of the compositions depict a world where species are disappearing. Transformation is less an accident than a principle of life.
Barroco at the Return Of Travel gallery
With Barroco, Retour De Voyage invites you to discover an artistic adventure based on sharing, abandonment and surprise. The works bear witness to this rare moment when two singular practices manage to give birth to a free territory, sensual, funny and disturbing, intensely alive.
The works of the exhibition
