Emmanuelle Pellet - En 68, t’aurais même pas osé balancer ton porc !

Emmanuelle Pellet - In ’68, you wouldn’t even have dared to fling your pig!
Acrylic painting on cardboard
H: 24 cm L: 25.5 cm
Unique piece, hand-painted, signed and numbered
The work was published in the Luxembourg Féminin magazine, for which the artist worked for several years. The illustration page and the cover of the magazine are attached to the shipment.

About the work:

Under a falling canopy of leaves not unlike the foliage of the 18th century, a young woman with a decidedly pop spirit — white boots, pink glasses, psychedelic dress — stands upright, sovereign, hands raised in a gesture that is as much a defense as a victory. Behind her, on the swing, a man with a pig’s body, cravat-ed and squeezed into his suit, is propelled into the void, legs in the air, in a posture as grotesque as it is comic.
The composition openly cites Fragonard’s The Swing: the rope crossing the canvas, the protective foliage, the swing’s play as a metaphor for desire and the male gaze. But the artist reverses the Enlightenment device — where the young woman, aloft, revealed her leg under the knowing eye of a lover hidden in the bushes — to make it the scene of a contemporary reckoning. The “pig” is no longer the observer: here he is projected, ridiculed, expelled from the frame by the force of the female gesture, a direct echo of the #BalanceTonPorc movement and of what it has changed in the power dynamics between the sexes.
Humor never yields to heaviness: the vivid palette, the supple line and the almost cartoonish theatricality of the scene keep the artwork on the side of fable rather than manifesto. It is a painting that makes you smile before it makes you think — and, like any good satire, gains depth the longer you look at it.
A singular work in the artist’s production, where the heritage of gallant painting meets a decidedly contemporary irony.

About the artist:

Art historian by training, Emmanuelle Pellet studied at the École du Louvre and then at the Sorbonne, before passing the Agrégation of Visual Arts (3rd place). After several years of teaching, she joined the Louvre Museum as head of Educational Action.
Her career now feeds a personal body of work where mastery of painting dialogues with a deep culture of images and the history of art. Her creations have been exhibited in galleries in Paris, London, Singapore and Mauritius, and have been the subject of numerous publications. They are now in private collections in Europe, North America, Asia and the Indian Ocean.