Elissa Marchal
Born in 1973, Elissa Marchal lives and works in Paris.
She develops abstract work based on color as the object and subject of painting.
Attention to the main material components of painting has led the artist to a very special relationship with matter. Color, deployed on prepared supports, is sculpted in the same way as a raw material: it is poured, then repeatedly sanded.
Through gradations of light, the resulting surfaces create depth, movement or lightness, depending on the proposal.
Whether in two or three dimensions, his work reveals complementarities: void/full, material/imaterial, surface/depth, liquid/solid, fragment/unity.
In a minimalist vein, Elissa Marchal focuses on the fundamentals of painting: perception, space and light.
She paints in series, following the logic of color development, and for the past ten years has been developing a color work in which paint flows over the raised surface, echoing Marc Devade's Le geste de la couleur in her own way. Elissa Marchal reveals the "stratifications" of painting: piling up lines in Sédimentations, superimposing slats in Assemblages, juxtaposing painted and reflected color in Jalousies and Cadres, tensioning two-tone color in Horizons... A stubborn, patient search for the manifestation of intensive color.
François Jeune in Art absolument, January-April 2019, n°87
photo©Romain Darnaud
