M comme Milla, 2014

ElleK  

With a training in advertising drawing and decorative painting, ElleK. took a course at Nicolas Poussin’s studio. Beside her personal plastic research, Ellek. takes pleasure in illustration: she likes staging people, like the Parisians whom she paints in the subway universe (illustration of the RATP plan). Besides, her attachment to human led her to take part in a initiative of Parisian hospitals’ decoration. She also taught to difficult children at La Source, the school funded by Gérard Garouste. If she left Paris for Normandie where she set up her painting studio, it is to flee the grey atmosphere and find the light, it is also to leave behind the burden of daily life and begin the travel of her dreams. In her paintings, Ellek seeks the association of colors, the composition of shapes, through light effects to represent and create aspirations to somewhere else and the horizon. Her canvasses are here to make her travel, to make us travel to these known countries we can remember of, or to these unknown countries we dream of. True, Ellek’s painting gives us to see desolated or even disenchanted landscapes, sometimes slippery and often tortuous shortcuts, skies that are not mild. Nevertheless, a hopeful energy comes out of it. In her ochre landscapes, a few luminous houses, a few wild plants, a few serene women (mother with the child, water carrier) give us the testimony of beauty and quietness, softness and fervor. Maybe her past as a florist explains why Ellek only wants to offer softness in her compositions andcolors. Behind the tanned and burnt lands, the light of a blue sky, the clarity of an obvious freedom seem to break. Ellek’s painting is an aesthetic of serenity. Ellek invites us to feel disoriented, to bathe us in the lights, the colors, the perfumes, the cultures of this foreign part that learns us beauty and quietness.