Abstraction and imagination
The artist's studio is that of an alchemist. The representation of reality becomes the artwork's reality. What has been "seen" is resting, waiting secretly, sometimes for very long, for the gesture to bring it back to life, to transform it. Brush or ink; light, water, sky, and clouds have always been elements of Elena Prentice's work. Watercolors or paintings focus on a fragment, on an instant, on coloured impressions, personal visions in which landscapes and the world fill the canvas with macroscopic evidence.
Here, the dot has become a line. Perception, sensation, approach abstraction. Color has become horizontality. Up and down, sky and earth, are caught in frontal rigor. They gain strength from their suggestiveness, renouncing descriptive prettiness.
They assert themselves.
Line after line Gustave de Staël has built a universe of which he is the demiurge, the architect and the fanciful builder. Memory opens the doors of imagination. The flicker, the accumulation or the emptiness sustain each other to establish a reality, something possible, that they then proceed quickly to disturb. Imperceptibly but surely, the true and the seen no longer belong to the meticulousness of a trajectory which inhabits the space as it pleases. The universe goes haywire to become the dreamy proposals of its creator.
A subtle dizziness replaces the comfort of the familiar.
Jacqueline Aubenas
