Figure found. Confronted with the natural environment where fauna and flora defy perception, she uses marks to explore a nature rich in forms without artifice. In all, ten works are on exhibition and include both drawings and paintings.
Figure found
The Mamia Bretesché Gallery is delighted to present Eleanor Mitch’s recent works.
A subtle play on words, "Figure Found" makes us think of the idea of the figure and the ground (fond in French for ground) or how to imagine forms with marks and their relationship to space.
The mark is the main thread in all of Eleanor Mitch’s work.
In 2005, she received a bi-national grant from the Brazilian and American governments and moved there. She creates an artist’s book and works inspired by nature. Confronted with the natural environment where fauna and flora defy perception, she uses marks to explore a nature rich in forms without artifice. In all, ten works are on exhibition and include both drawings and paintings.
The figures are bulbs or insects, miniscule creatures from far off jungles or the uncertain forms of real or imaginary flora. The colors are sometimes acid, sometimes loud, expressing the primeval and wild state of a gluttonous and insolent nature. However the paradox resides in the aceticism, the trembling of the mark, perceived as a trembling of time before our very eyes.
These drawings evoke the fragility of nature, of the mark. They seem inclined to want to protect nature and its fragile forms. She places us before a completed work, before nature itself and beyond this before the fragility of art. She reveals the consciousness of the art of the fragile.
In 2003, Eleanor Mitch exhibited superb pencil drawings from the series “Un Travail au Noir (et au blanc)” at the gallery. The works from the series are based on a fundamental mark, the beginning of all drawing and of all pictorial works. The result was above and beyond all hopes for the connoisseur and unimaginable for the profane.
With simple marks, landscapes are born or disappear, water trembles, twinkling, and new perspectives are announced for contemporary drawing. This time, it’s the figure and the ground that will bring Eleanor Mitch to pursue this quest for the purity of the mark. She will present her most recent works created in Brazil for the exhibition.
Opening september 13, 2007
Galerie Mamia Bretesche'
48, rue Chapon - Paris
Free admission