ORELART PARIS Art Contemporain Russe et International

Following the Soviet period, nobility titles are not recognized anymore in Russia.
Annouchka Brochet, princess originally from the great Russian aristocratic family, Galizin, lives in this ambiguous situation, between genealogical heritage and social conventions. Her work reflects this duality, between existence and non-existence.

Her last light boxes series proposes interpretations of dreamed images. Ever since the early childhood, in every woman lives a princess who has only one ambition: to exist. Advertising plays with this unconfessed phantasm by selling fragrances, cosmetics, luxury products… In front of these women in trance, who have whiffed the new fragrances’ emanations, or grazed unseen jewels, one can grasp that the actual religion of our society is the one of consumption. The borderline between ecstasy and death is in these conditions almost missing. These closed eyes, these beatific mouths have all of the Saints, whose quick death satisfied them by bringing them closer to the Divinity.

The thematic of her new exhibition « Ecstasy » pursues this reflection. If the concept of ecstasy first refers to the old-world Saints transported to the sky by divine vision, the word is nowadays associated with either sexuality or the trendy nightclubs’ little pill of faddish happiness. Though ecstasy is daily the one from consumption.

However, this series particularly questions the position of the artist woman in front of advertising images; the ones of these young, ideal, and unreachable women. Is it still possible to paint a portrait ahead such an inflation of ideal images? Her answer as painter is to give all its strength and its sense to the gesture. This is not anymore the sensitive makeup artist’s gesture but the one of the woman who, tired out by the numerous layers put on her lips and on the skin of her face, mashes up the tube of painting or the lipstick on the mirror which is in front of her.
The use of the light box gives all its sense to the work. The plastic, as a mirror, keeps the trace of a faddish beauty’s escape whereas the concealed engraved pattern only comes alive under the action of the artificial light. The work is triple: painting, engraving and light are indivisible.