Discover the contemporary work of Émilie PAULY
A self-taught artist, I started painting in 2014, a few years after the birth of my son.
The path that led me to painting? Essentially the need to escape a boring professional life, to reconnect with my childhood dreams at a time when I had lost myself, and the desire to bring fantasy to everyone (young and old). I was fascinated by the magnificent illustrations discovered in the children's albums that I read at my child, and I wanted to create my own images, my own paintings, which would tell my inner world, my dreams, my fantasies, my ideals. I wanted to paint what transported me so as to never forget it, to keep a memory of it that I could transmit, communicate. I wanted to paint to reconcile myself with a life in which I did not really recognize myself, to find who I was, finally. Accept the past, understand the present that results from it and love it. Because beauty is everywhere in the end and because it is always possible to rewrite the story of one's life.
When I create characters with a pencil, I never know in advance what I am going to draw. I let my hand go and then I see what appears. I like not knowing where my gesture will lead me. I like to be surprised by what emerges from the first strokes of the pencil. I have the pleasant impression of accessing something of myself that was lost (in my unconscious or in my distant memories, who knows?).
When I have gathered a large enough number of pencil drawings, I look for those that could be assembled in the same scene, the characters who could live adventures together in the same painting. I spend a lot of time creating these compositions. When I have discovered which characters have things to say to each other and in which setting they could evolve, I move on to painting. I always paint my background first (a natural landscape) and then I insert my characters. Everything is done in acrylic gouache.
Painting and drawing seemed to me to be more reliable and powerful means of expression than texts and speeches. A linguist by training, I nevertheless worked for a long time on words and the construction of meaning when I was preparing my doctoral thesis. The polysemy in languages is sometimes so dizzying! If I have remained sensitive to the poetry of literary works as well as to the beauty well-conducted arguments, these move me less, today, than poetry or the beauty of images. Words, sometimes misleading or a source of misunderstanding, never colorful enough or on the contrary too saturated, cannot do everything. When we no longer know what to say or how to say it, when words fail, when silence is imposed, painting, sculpture, music or dance can take over, for the pleasure of all. Where words and languages separate us, art ultimately brings us together.
