Éliane Monnin

Eliane Monnin was born in Morteau (Doubs), from a family of watchmakers, speleologists and collectors of collections. After studying applied arts and then plastic arts at the faculty of Strasbourg, she set up her workshop in the Basque country in 2002. A new field of action opened up to her in 2007 when she discovered working with the land. , this material animates her and the fascination she feels towards nature and its organic abstractions pushes her to create a sensitive universe close to living things. Through these primitive living systems, the artist seeks representations of our own body. Viruses emerging from the abyss, soft beasts with strange epidermis, the impression of a teeming life, animal, plant or human, she blurs the tracks and builds a universe oscillating between attraction and repulsion. These improbable objects born of a personal mythology, taken out of a cabinet of curiosities, refer us to the ambivalences of the body, to the territories of touch and touch. "We find, in Eliane Monnin's creations, the spirit of the classic Cabinet of Curiosities and its elementary engine: to amass, isolate, order but also place the rare object in a space, a context that charges it with meaning. There is also something of the fascination for the mathematical structure of natural objects, for the paradox between the irregularity of shapes and the formula behind the perfect repetition of patterns, for nature as the producer of a life drive that could to confine to art, which itself would reproduce something of nature ... Shells, epidermis, gushes of plants, organics, minerals emerge in a disturbing staging where obsession, fascination-repulsion, anguish ... but also humor, are not absent. It is at the same time the marvelous and the poetic, the intimate and the emotion, which play in the work of Eliane with the borders between the wonders of nature (naturalia ), the tour de force ar tisanal and artistic language (artificialia). " by Sevan L'Hostis. 2015.