Aurelie Arzoine Lafages

Born in 1997 in Montreuil, Aurélie Arzoine Lafages works at the intersection of painting and performance. Drawing on an Afro-Caribbean heritage, her practice explores the relationships between memory, emotion, and identity formation, bringing individual and plural identities into dialogue within a shifting pictorial space.

The human figure occupies a central place in her oil paintings. Faces drawn close together, isolated or overlapping bodies, and people gathered around a table: gazes and postures structure her compositions. Contrasts between dark backgrounds, pale fabrics, and vividly coloured areas emphasise the presence of bodies, while some contours fade. Through a scene of people playing dominoes in Martinique, the heritage she evokes takes shape in everyday gestures and shared moments. These figures connect with the personal and collective narratives at the heart of her practice.

Moving between abstraction and figuration, her painting brings forth fragmented, sometimes evanescent figures. These bodies, held in tension between appearance and disappearance, carry intimate histories shaped by diasporic, cultural, and spiritual memories. Each mark, each painterly gesture acts as a vehicle for silent transmission, an attempt to bring forth what eludes language.

For the artist, painting becomes a means of both grounding and escape. It explores shifting identities, multiple forms of belonging, and memories in flux. Each work unfolds through a process of gradual revelation. Rather than imposing a truth, it invites the viewer to listen to an embodied memory. In this dialogue between the visible and the invisible, between self and other, her painting becomes a space of lived presence, at once a refuge, a threshold, and a space of resonance.

A graduate of the École supérieure d'art d'Avignon in 2022 and the Beaux-Arts de Marseille in 2025, Aurélie Arzoine Lafages participated in the group exhibition “Entre deux eaux" at the Friche la Belle de Mai in 2025. In 2026, she was named among the recipients of the Jacques-Henri Hostyn Painting Prize.