Emmanuelle Villard

The touching part of Emmanuelle Villard’s work lies in its double invitation: an admission to the trials and aesthetic jubilation of painting, and, at the same time, the opening up of abstract painting to contemporary problematics-image consumption, the body, intimacy, femininity…Whilst many contemporary artist are plunging themselves into photography and video, tending towards intimate exhibitionism or spectacular representation of the body, Emmanuelle Villard prefers to weave the surface of her canvas with possible ornaments or physical irregularities, questioning the validity of painting today, stimulating feminine evolution in life and artistic creation.[…]

No one can escape the seduction in Emmannuelle Villard’s work. Her paintings, flashy and colorful, produce a shop-window effect, like sweets-shop or clothes shop windows or stalls at a fair, which accidentally the artist enjoys photographing. Unless it is a case of painting as one puts on make-up, of considering paint as a surface device and ornament. Or again, of consuming the paintings as one would consume seemingly appetizing cakes: if our eye was a tongue, we would often find Emmanuelle Villard’s paintings a little too sweet. Were therefore does this sickly sweet taste that remains in our eyes come from?[…]

One begins to see how such painting maintain an essential link with skin, not as a simple surface or envelope, but as a real place of exchange, transformation and contact. Between the paint pot and the epidermal deposit of paint on canvas, between matter and pictorial form, carnal interstices develop that permit the rubbing of one matter against another, the shifting of one from towards another, the moving of one painting towards another, the passage from external to internal, interchangeable habitation of identity envelopes. These however are only the effect of paint with no representational claims. But this anatomical non-representation leads to infinite tussles, mixing suppleness, density, fragility, consistency and the emergence of shapeless matter.[…]

Larys Frogier, “ Emmanuelle Villard : painting skin-deep” in cat. Emmanuelle Villard

La Criée centre d’art contemporain (Rennes), 2002