Emilie Chauvel

Émilie Chauvel is a French visual artist and a Christian iconographer born in 1985. She had the opportunity to be initiated to the ancestral sacred art of icon painting in Ukraine, she uses the same traditional technic throughout her practice. Emulsion painting [egg and white beer] and pigments on wood; levkas installation [rabbit skin glue and clay blanc de Meudon], gold leaf gilt, 23kt75.

These sacred icons are part of contemporary iconography. It can offer images that can sometimes be perceived as scandalous or deviant. However, they are still respectful of the theological canon: Scripture of the Holy Scripture. Furthermore, she works with a live male model, in a real collaboration around his research. And offering something new in art history, in a way quite unprecedented: masculine nude, feminine; the nude man woman-seen.

One can understand his work by the notions of infinity and finite, void, lack, helplessness, emptiness, shadows, scream, death, life, desire, sign, sex and sex as origin and manifestation of incompleteness, the feminine and the masculine, … It is structured around these two axes: an intimate scream emitted to the void of heaven; and, seeking for Christ, looking up to God. So, we have a work that skillfully mixes Sacred Art and Secular Art, sometimes within one of her works, like a prayer.