Emmanuelle Pellet - L’Odalisque

Emmanuelle Pellet - La Grande Odalisque
Acrylic painting on cardboard
H : 19 cm L : 30 cm
Unique piece, hand-painted, signed and numbered
The work was published in the children's album/CD, The Girl, by Jean de La Fontaine, which is included with the shipment.

About the work:

This composition playfully riffs on Ingres's La Grande Odalisque (1814), from which it borrows the languid pose, the deep blue drapery, and the overall architecture of the scene. But the reversal is total: the female figure, idealized in Ingres, faces a portly male figure, with a grotesque and screaming face. Her scandalized gaze and wide-open mouth transform the reference's hushed eroticism into a burlesque comic scene.

Around him, an incongruous menagerie heightens the absurd: a dog, reflected in a mirror, observes the scene from the spectator's seat, while a monkey, seated in an almost human posture, contemplates the situation with a blasé air.

The work is part of a tradition of citing and subverting art history, where the classical canon is reactivated to be questioned more deeply. The artist interrogates the codes of the academic nude, the gaze cast upon the body, and the boundary between the sublime and the ridiculous. Visual humor — witness animals, kitschy accessories, incongruous objects — functions as a distancing device, inviting the viewer to laugh while reflecting on the symbolic load of the references they recognize.

About the artist:

Art historian 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 career today informs a personal body of work where mastery of painting dialogues with a deep culture of imagery and art history. Her creations have been exhibited in galleries in Paris, London, Singapore and Mauritius, and have been the subject of numerous publications. They are now part of private collections in Europe, North America, Asia and the Indian Ocean.