Victorine Follana

Journey

Victorine Follana had been scribbling since her early childhood, but it was after visiting the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris at the beginning of 1970 that she discovered, firsthand, the work of the painter Chaim Soutine, it was this emotional shock that really made me want to go into painting. After a few years of self-taught work, she enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Sète from 1982 to 1987 (drawing, painting, art history section) Attending many artists living in the region and a passionate student of art history, painting became a necessity for her.

From 1987, she participated in intensive courses at the Talens Academy (known as the island of painters) where renowned abstract and figurative artists, professors in major Parisian art schools, intervene. In this place, she had the opportunity to work and establish friendships with Robert Lapoujade, painter, filmmaker, writer, who died in 1993, with Joël Trolliet, painter and general treasurer of the Réalités Nouvelles fair in Paris, and with Thibault de Reimpré (deceased in 2023).

Many personal and group exhibitions have marked her career until today, she is present in French and foreign collections (Spain, USA-Nebraska, Holland, England, Germany, Belgium, Mexico).

Painting is a language

The inner world of Victorine Follana takes us into a dense and colorful universe, where signs and shapes intertwine to offer us abstract or figurative images of powerful poetry. To achieve this, she uses all kinds of techniques, mainly oil, acrylic, oil pastels, but also pure pigments to give life and intensity to the material of her works.

She likes to dialogue for a long time with the canvas in order to gradually enrich the language of forms in her "fictitious worlds", she seeks to understand the one around us in order to criticize it, escape it, flee it, and rediscover it. create in his own way. The initial constraints (shapes, signs, color harmonies) allow him to let a creativity and inventiveness blossom which give him great freedom of expression.

Nothing is left to chance even if at first glance it seems spontaneous, everything is the object of meticulous work that knows how to disappear in favor of emotion. She dares to combine tones, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, which mutually enhance each other. Mysterious black spaces are the nights that allow the lunar whites to flourish, they offer the often intense colors the setting of their richness.

After long silences of maturing in the secrecy of the workshop, balance, plenitude are the signs of completion.

She likes to say and say again on canvas, paper, cardboard, all the serious or light poetry in the world in order to signify "The mysterious and the terrible" as Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German poet, said so well.

“What is important is not to finish a work, but to see that it will one day allow something to begin. »