Epicentre, 2023

Aurélie Salvaing  

Aurélie Salvaing focuses on subtitling life. She thus draws portraits and attitudes in ink and ballpoint pen on backgrounds created from fragments of books and maps. She invites viewers to experience different depths. Each of her works seems to hold a secret door that opens onto poetic and sensitive interior landscapes.

Initially, she had fun sketching lawyers, for whom she was doing research, on books destined for destruction and which evoked their professions. The approach seemed promising to her, as words opened up new perspectives for drawings. Once she took flight, she maintained her attachment to texts and if her first works were elaborated solely on and by writings, she quickly emancipated herself and developed singular techniques by reinventing the palimpsest.

Her work presents itself as a visual exploration of remanence, this partial persistence of emotions, memories or impressions after their disappearance. The large formats exhibited embody this tension between evanescence and permanence, highlighting a very contemporary way of treating portraiture.

These works propose a plastic approach where figuration and abstraction meet. Faces, sometimes emerging or partially veiled, dialogue with textured materials, superpositions of layers, and fragments of writings. Each canvas translates the idea that certain traits or expressions, although ephemeral, continue to resonate and haunt our perception. This "contemporary writing"—understood here as a modern way of rewriting the portrait—anchors the subject in a temporality where traces of the past dialogue with the present.

Through their immersive power, these works invite the viewer to feel the impact of these visual and emotional resonances, while questioning how memory and emotion persist beyond the visible. They are visual journals where words, fragments of sentences or evanescent glyphs appear, almost by chance. These inscriptions, sometimes erased or partially visible, testify to the interaction between the conscious and the unconscious.