Emmanuelle Pellet - Liberté, je t’aime

Facing the immensity of a twilight sky, a little girl stands at the water’s edge, a frock of fluttered chiffon blown by the wind, hand laid on her heart in a gesture of silent contemplation. Her downcast gaze rests on her dog, standing against her, a paw pressed on her dress, seeking its caress.
The subject — apparently a scene of classical genre — is precisely what the work seeks to outwit. For the sky occupies more than half the canvas: dark storm clouds, a pink and saffron blaze of a setting sun, reflections on an almost still sea, relegating the human figure to a mere scale reference in the face of the pictorial matter that overflows and dominates the composition.

If the technique is of a rigor that is altogether classic — patient glazes, building light by strata, atmospheric sensibility that owes much to the great Romantic landscape of the 19th century — the artist embraces a productive tension between a craft inherited from old masters and a composition decisively current, which treats the sky not as a background but as the real subject of the canvas — vast, moving, abstract in places.

A work that questions, with great technical mastery, what painting a landscape can still mean today: less to tell a scene than 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 of 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 part of private collections in Europe, North America, Asia and the Indian Ocean.

NB: the canvas will be sent mounted on its frame, equipped with a fixing system.