Emmanuelle Pellet - Liberté, je t’aime

Facing the immensity of a twilight sky, a little girl stands at the water's edge, her gauze dress creased by the wind, hand resting on her heart in a gesture of silent contemplation. Her lowered gaze rests on her dog, standing against her, a paw pressed on her dress, seeking a caress.
The subject — outwardly a scene of classic genre — is precisely what the work comes to subvert. For the sky occupies more than half the canvas: dark storm clouds, a pink and saffron blaze from a setting sun, reflections on a nearly motionless sea, relegating the human figure to a mere scale reference against the pictorial matter that overflows and dominates the composition.

If the technique is of a rigorously classical standard — patient glazes, building light in layers, atmospheric sensitivity deeply indebted to the great Romantic landscape of the nineteenth century — the artist embraces a fertile tension between a craft inherited from old masters and a decidedly contemporary composition, which treats the sky not as a background but as the true subject of the painting — vast, moving, at times abstract.

A work that, with great technical mastery, asks what it can still mean to paint a landscape today: less to tell a scene and more to experience, physically and sensorially, the material and the light.

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

NB: the painting will be sent mounted on its stretcher, equipped with a securing system.