Sandra Chérès

Sandra Chérès is one of those artists who are not afraid to talk about their works, and to tell their stories. She speaks with simplicity of her relationship to paper, of this passion for a material that has always fascinated her and has pushed her to create since adolescence. She sees this material as a way of finding yourself. It is first of all the written words that echo the identity, but also the very origin of the material, coming from the tree which plunges its roots into the earth. And it is this rooting that is obviously in question in Sandra's work. In line with the New Realists, Sandra Chérès tears up posters in the street, or cuts out magazines, and rearranges them as she pleases. At the base of this idea? The need to "scratch to get behind, like with people," she said. Sandra, a trained film editor, likes to tell stories and edit collages “like you do movie clips”. She gives a framework to her stories, made of various chaotic elements, in order to structure them. Cinema is important for the artist. He marked his young years. On the web, she positions faces, words, movie stars, straight out of the Paris-Matches of the 60s and 70s that she collects. However, in the pop side of her works, Sandra does not look so much for icons and glitter as for strong figures and striking expressions. She shapes her paintings with love and humor, two feelings that she confides that she cannot live without. She then protects them, in turn under netting or fishnets, a feminine material if there is one, so fine and yet so resistant. The artist says that by recycling, she recycles, gives a second life to the objects, to the men and women who inhabit her works. By placing new words in their mouths, she enunciates and creates other possibilities. Through his paintings, memories burst into us and resonate, like so many testimonies torn from the palimpsest of advertising panels or compilations of tabloid memories. The paper brings the matter and the subject; the creative gesture, the poetry.