Élisabeth Gineste (Sitelle)

Sitelle's self-taught pictorial practice flourishes through a rich and fertile artistic approach. It combines visual sensitivity – via photographic practice, in particular – and the knowledge and fluidity of the performed body through theatre, dance theatre, stage direction, and reading aloud. Haunted by words, stories, and their staging, the artist's pictorial works emerge as wonderful cinematographic shots – close-ups, from which a suggested and enigmatic off-screen space emanates. The narration that colours all of Sitelle's work might also be that which we internalise, that which we tell ourselves. This internalising of story, the thrall of words, and the exploration they lead to, have long taken symbolically and emotionally charged abstract forms in the artist's paintings. Gradually, with incontestable maturity, they crystallise into human figures rooted within increasingly familiar landscapes.