From 17 September to 29 October 2016, the Carouge gallery Le Salon Vert will welcome the French artist Isabelle Ménéan, born in 1981 and living and working in Geneva. On this occasion we will see her recent work on paper and an artist book edited in cooperation with éditions Ripopée.
Isabelle Ménéan uses watercolors, charcoal, and India ink because the immediate and spontaneous nature of these media enables her to engage in a dialogue with chance. She enjoys exploring the haphazard, bringing into creation shapes imbued with their own autonomy and their own life in order to then transform them using the progressive intuitions of her subtle, delicate and practiced brush stroke. She animates her colorful watercolors with nature-based energies, mixing plant and animal; in one example a passerine melts into the hedge on which it is perched, and in another a rose bush twists until it becomes a snake.
Fascinated by ancient botanical prints, Isabelle Ménéan also investigates the human form—although this form is still part of a nature-based transformation, as can be seen in the large-scale “Olympia”, in charcoal. Here we see a Grecian figure overtaken by vegetation, emerging out of misty memories of Manet, which then in turn evoke an echo of the Sleeping Venus and of Titian. Ménéan is also inspired by French neo-Baroque painters like Fragonard or Boucher, in whose paintings the subjects find themselves lost inside luxurious and vast gardens which close around them to the point of suffocation.