Emmanuelle Pellet - Vanitas vanitatis (XL)

Emmanuelle Pellet - Vanitas vanitatis
Acrylic painting on canvas
H: 91.5 cm W: 72.5 cm
Unique piece, hand-painted, signed and numbered
The canvas is sent rolled

About the work:

Standing in a field of flowers whose heart is an eye, a girl with pink and blue curls fixes the viewer with a grave gaze. Pleated dress with a Claudine collar and lace hem, blue ankle-strap shoes, hands crossed behind her back: she poses like an old portrait, under a saturated pink sky where a rocket rises in the distance leaving a trail of flames.
The title ties the scene to the tradition of vanitas, those still lifes that recalled the fragility of human ambitions. Here, the conquest of Mars stands in for a skull and an hourglass: the human technological drive is confronted with childhood, silent and motionless, and with hundreds of eyes of flowers, blue, green, amber, which seem to watch as much as contemplate. The pink, color of sweetness, becomes that of strangeness.
In Emmanuelle Pellet's pop-surreal universe, the large eyes are the place where the painting meets the viewer. Here they multiply to the point of vertigo, for a work that is at once delicate, unsettling and deeply contemporary.

About the artist:

Art historian by training, Emmanuelle Pellet studied at the École du Louvre and then at the Sorbonne, before being admitted to the Agrégation of Plastic Arts (3rd place). After several years of teaching, she joined the Louvre Museum as head of educational action.
Her career nourishes today a personal body of work where mastery of painting dialogues with a deep culture of images 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 in private collections in Europe, North America, Asia and the Indian Ocean.