L'enfant à la coque, 2016

Maryse-Anne Couteau  

Self-taught, Maryse-Anne Couteau has always drawn. The pencil has long been her favorite working tool and she still uses this technique, which is not widely used by adults, that are colored pencils. For a few years, however, she has also been working in ink.

His first productions, very little colored and with very fine graphics, managed to suggest the volume by a black line slightly underlined with color. Then the color imposed itself more and more and ended up supplanting the line. The tones at the beginning very assertive, are refined. It is by superimposing the layers of color that the artist obtains the mixtures and nuances which are one of the characteristics of his work.

Although the body and the human face hold a large place in her universe, Maryse-Anne Couteau does not limit herself to any style or type of representation, featuring objects as well as animals or characters. It is in reality that the artist finds an inexhaustible source of inspiration, while the fertility of his imagination and his keen sense of observation intertwine a surprising interior world and a precise and detailed reality.

In his unusual compositions one can guess the impossible desire to get as close as possible to the object, as if to reach its very essence. The overlaps, the slides, the transparencies of actually opaque surfaces, the repetition of shapes at different scales or the modification of the viewing angle on the same object thus testify to a gaze that would like to see higher and deeper, to embrace the subject in its totality instead of being limited to the face it offers, seeing further by projecting it into the future and the past, going under the surface of things in order to go beyond the limit that traces the contours and join the infinite richness hidden by each element of reality.

After studies and a professional life that were in no way artistic, Maryse-Anne Couteau decided to fully invest in drawing and has devoted herself for almost 30 years to her passion.