Stretched back, 2009

Emmanuelle Vroelant   New & remarkable Artists

The Breton light as a loom

There are artistic lives that are built in a straight line, and then there is that of Emmanuelle Vroelant, made of bifurcations that, each time, have led her a little further. Born in 1952, she studied clinical psychology, then a 5-year trip, which leads her to Vanuatu and towards painting: on site, two decisive encounters reveal within her a vocation that will never leave her. She exhibits for the first time in 1978, on the other side of the world.

Back in Paris, she opens her first studio in 1981 and exhibits for four years in a row at the Salon d'Automne. Different exhibitions in Paris and the provinces will follow. The inauguration of a gallery in New York will lead her to China.

A period of illness then distances her from the canvas, and she becomes a psychoanalyst and Art-therapist for several years, a parenthesis that undoubtedly refines her view of creation.

The real second breath arrives in 2006, when she leaves Paris to settle in Brittany, in Roscoff. The light of the Finistère coast becomes her raw material, and she finds a creative intensity that will carry the rest of her work. 

What strikes her is the frankness with which she embraces her influences without dissolving into them: Michelangelo, Vermeer, Kandinsky, Soulages. But it is Zao Wou-Ki whom she designates as her "true pictorial encounter," the one who showed her how silence and color could together inhabit the space of the canvas.

From this dialogue with the masters, a language of her own was born, "suggestive abstraction": large formats where the material — marble powder, mortar, collage, plant fibers — becomes the subject itself, carried by a demand for simplicity that is ever more radical. "Say more with less," as she likes to put it.

Today represented by the gallery Art and Heart and present on the major online art platforms, Emmanuelle Vroelant's works travel far beyond French borders: USA, Australia, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, Italy, England, Saudi Arabia…