Les arbres bleus, 2025

Elisabeth Coudol  

The common thread running through her works is evident: vibrant and colorful, it meanders between imagination and poetry, which the artist develops in enchanted landscapes, idealized trees, convivial still lifes—which she prefers to call scenes of life—and abundant floral motifs. Her approach is dedicated to transforming our horizons, re-enchanting our familiar daily lives, and exalting them by simplifying their expression. Her canvases are figurative, set apart from academic realism, flirting with abstraction, in a concision orchestrated by a dynamic composition around multiple partitioned spaces. "For me, painting reality for reality's sake holds no interest; I want to remain on the edge, to bypass the tedious narration of academic reality, to offer free interpretations, to strive for fiction, to dream more." Her inspirations meander between her home under the trees at the edge of the forest in Barbizon and the incandescent South of her childhood. Using a stylized pictorial style and a vibrant palette, her fragmented compositions are imbued with textural effects that define her unique identity. After experimenting with the fluidity of watercolor and the creaminess of oil paint, particularly during her time in workshops (with Pierre-Dominique Giess, among others), the artist quickly gravitated towards the rich plasticity of acrylic paint, combining brushes and palette knives to explore this medium's abundant possibilities. She begins by preparing colored backgrounds, then layers transparent washes, scraping, stretching, working, and creating textures, primarily seeking to evoke the vibrancy of structures, reliefs, and materials. Sometimes she incorporates small pieces of Thai and Japanese paper, ink, oil pastels, sand, and other materials that enrich the graphic effect. Her love of words is never far away; an avid reader and author, she writes short stories and children's books, published notably by Père Castor Flammarion, Mijade, Ricochet, l'Elan Vert, Frimousse, Mine, Milan, Fleurus… and for an audio story app AlmaStudio created by DJ Martin Solveig.
She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in independent galleries, notably in Barcelona and Brussels, Paris, Granville, Roanne, Lyon, Lille, Toulon and Bédoin in the Luberon.