Ghost series
“In my series” Ghost “, I try to develop a reflection around the body and its absence, intimacy, and loss, through an essential issue in the history of art, the drape. , which carries in its fold an exceptional power of evocation in its sensitive and contemplative character, placing it still today well beyond a simple tool of pathos.
Always leaving an important place for the white of the paper, I question the absences of the chosen motif and try to reveal its poetry. The partial absence of the body in this series works intimately with the presence of white, a void that fills the void; the white indicates the absences of the drawing.
The choice of this motif is linked to my personal history, and I actually believe that our vision of fabric and more generally of clothing is very ambiguous: it has a special place for each of us, between the trivial object that we take out carelessly, the fetish that we store carefully, or the rag that we throw away without guilt. The fabric speaks of our relationship to everyday life, to the intimate, and to the body. ”
Manon Pellan
Paris, February, 2021
Trashs series
“For me there is a form of violence and emotion in the observation of the banality of the elements that make up our space. It makes sense for me to question, through still life and modern vanity, our contemporary relationship to objects, and our way of ritualizing them or not. This is a problem that has crossed our history for a long time.
Even if the choice to draw around this question is very intuitive, sensitive and personal, I admit being crossed by strong references from our history, from ancient Rhyparography, to Daniel Spoerri’s “trap paintings”. I am also not unaware that still life was for a long time a constraint imposed on women artists, who sought to free themselves from it. As a woman artist, it seems interesting to me, in a time when our relationship to images and consumption is very different, to reappropriate the subject, and make it a ritual through drawing.
Against our habit, which pushes us to hide what turns us off or indifferent to us, and to move very quickly from one image to another, I decide to stop and make a case for the waste, whether it is in precious dishes or in a plastic bag. When I take a closer look at these objects that do not deserve special attention, I choose to ritualize them, and place them at the center of attention.
When I fix myself on the inside of a trash can, or a plate at the end of a meal, something very moving happens to me, all the first emptiness that can emerge from their ordinary character, is counterbalanced by the ‘special attention that I pay them, by their representation through the drawing.
Wanting to approach noticeably these textures which only provoke us a priori only repulsion, and to put a certain precision in them, is also to allow them to express a delicacy, a fragility which perhaps brings us closer to an awareness of the sustainability of our existence. ”
Manon Pellan
Paris, February, 2021
