Emmanuelle Pellet - Le bateau de secours/La pirogue

A straight face plucked from the Dutch collections of the Golden Age: pearly complexion, strawberry-pink lips with the meticulousness of a goldsmith, pearl earrings, a grave and frontal gaze. The brushwork is learned, the light built according to the codes of classic chiaroscuro — everything in this piece calls to mind Rembrandt or his contemporaries, and the technical rigor of the portrait is impressive.

But atop this young woman’s head, with her curly blonde hair, there sails a small boat, a tiny black-and-ochre dinghy, with two entwined figures aboard. The detail is as unexpected as it is deliciously absurd: the craft, resting like a court headdress, transforms the austere portrait of ceremonial grandeur into an image with a double reading, between daydream and personal fable.

The title, The Lifeboat, completes the tilt of the work into fiction: what is saved, what is fled from, when one wears the ocean on one’s head? The artist skillfully plays with the gap between traditional painting and surreal invention, offering a painting that first seduces with technical virtuosity, then surprises and intrigues with its incongruous detail — those are the kinds of details one never tires of looking at and questioning.

A strong, funny and mysterious piece at once, that plays on the authority of an old painting and the spirit of a contemporary work.

About the artist
Historian by training, Emmanuelle Pellet studied at the École du Louvre and then at the Sorbonne before passing the Agrégation in Visual Arts (3rd rank). After several years of teaching, she joined the Louvre Museum as head of educational outreach.
Her works have been exhibited in galleries in Paris, London, Singapore and Mauritius. They have been the subject of numerous publications and are today in private collections in Europe, North America, Asia and the Indian Ocean.

NB: the canvas will be sent mounted on a frame, ready to be fixed to the wall with its hanging system, or ready to be framed.