Éléna Salah

Éléna Salah thus unfolds her gaze on the ruins of the world. By questioning her origins and her destiny, she works on the processes of remembrance, their motivations and the need for transmission. What strikes first is the contrast between the lightness, the economy of forms and the gravity of the subjects treated. She clearly places the traumatic event, the tragedy, at the root of our experience, and the architecture, the monument, the place, as proof and symbol of the catastrophe. Far from the romantic temptation and its fantasized representations, the artist chooses a specific mode of presence in her relationship to history. Her travels to Sicily, Japan, Algeria are quests and the concrete spaces of her action, whose poetic status promises the transformation of chaos into art, subtle, sensitive, modest. The landscapes are no longer a picturesque spectacle but a reality from which meaning can emerge. She prefers them empty, unproductive, which speak of the place of their disappearance and send survivors back to the anguish of a responsibility.