Emmanuelle Pellet - Aller simple

Emmanuelle Pellet - One-Way
Acrylic painting - Signed original - 2006
H: 29.7 cm W: 20.9 cm

About the artwork:

A girl with a grave expression, golden hair in living curls, is suspended in the air by a harness of straps attached to the beak of a wading bird (stylized stork) whose wings spread across the top of the composition. Clad in an orange-red dress that unfurls like a corolla, arms and legs spread in a suspended-fall gesture, she gazes at the viewer with wide, anxious blue-ringed eyes.

The work distorts the popular motif of the stork bringing a baby: here, the reassuring myth of birth becomes a scene of vertigo and uncertainty. The painterly treatment—between facial realism and the fantastical marionette-like body—evokes surrealist currents, while maintaining a personal, almost narrative style, close to illustration (Emmanuelle Pellet is a painter who also works as an illustrator for women's press and children's publishing).

About the artist:

A historian of art by training, Emmanuelle Pellet studied at the École du Louvre and then at the Sorbonne before passing the Agrégation in visual arts (3rd place). 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 now in private collections in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Indian Ocean.