PERMANENT CHANGE: AN ART EXHIBITION

The display of this exhibition invites you to find a flow between the various mediums of painting, collages, calligraphy and photography. This exhibition mixes works grounding in stillness with some reflecting movement, some about suffocating and some about spaciousness, some very intimate and other impersonal. It is about Change. It is about noticing change and expressing change. 

Changes of light, changes of mood, change as an invitation for growth, and of course more actual than ever changes of times.

The painting on the invitation is inspired by a small  shop on the side of the road in a remote village near Mount Kenya. The canvas big size allows a journey through the vitality and saturation of the colors but also the painful poverty underlying. It reflects the joy and libido of the soil in Africa as well as the fragility of life there and everywhere. When colors and shapes meet, new forms emerge, making space for themselves between the squares, like a scream. Something raw is revealed and it hides its shyness behind the delicate white layer like behind a bride’s veil.

It’s also about revealing. Revealing what is hidden behind what is seen. It’ s about layers of seeing, and revealing. It offers itself to your eyes, and invites what wants to be seen to be revealed.  

An emotion in you, a thought,  a movement that you didn’t notice before.

The photo of the pool catches your eyes and your mind (is it a real pool?), but more interestingly than the mental or visual attraction, it is the composition that carries the artist’s message here; each character avoids to look at each other!  This work questions our lack of sincere interest and curiosity for each other.

Both in paintings and photos, whether abstract or expressive, familiar or unsettling, this art  is flexible, unbound by a structure, a rule or a goal. 

The artist’s commitment to presence and freedom makes it about permanent change. The work reinvents itself at each stroke of the brush or at each shot. It follows a current until this current changes, and this happens again and again, on its own time.

This is why you can’t easily define a style, a line of work, or a unique message. The guidance is in the change. The change is the only permanent characteristic. It is for now, and this too, will change.

The exhibition includes a series of paintings inspired by dialogues (between humans, materials or emotions), and more technical games with colors in monochromatic works. Some of the paintings include various media like collage of my photos, or of calligraphy made in a week long self retreat.

Some photos are hijacked photos of groups of children posing for someone else, and most of the sceneries are shot when the light changes at dawn or dusk. 

The variety of media and style may stimulate your curiosity or irritate you. Works in this exhibition have been re-arranged to elicit a reaction to change, sometimes a harmonious melody, sometimes a sharp turn on a path. Series have been intentionally scattered and works have been re-arranged according to their visual features, stressing out the change of style or media.

The works exposed are about seeing the details and the textures, seeing what has never been seen before, at this precise instant, under this precise light, from this angle. And likewise, nobody ever looked at it in this precise angle at this moment under this precise light. It is about timelessness than resides in an instant if only you are open to notice it. 

Change is permanent, we all know that instinctively and spend quite a lot of our energy hiding it from ourselves. The COVID crisis has unveiled a lot of uncertainty and shaken our “order of things” in every single domain….This exhibition is an invitation to explore this theme. 

You are invited to walk and see, pause, breathe and let what wants to reveal itself be seen. Notice what you notice, and enjoy the ride! 

About Audrey

From early Childhood I was drawn to beautiful images, Especially Japanese. I grew up in France, and spent my twenties in Paris where I Studied medicine to become an Eye Surgeon,  and later on a mother. I marvelled at the conciergerie and l’Ile Saint Louis and traveled around delecting on paintings from small churches in Italy to museums in Europe and the US, as well as craft and fabric markets in Morocco, Guatemala or Senegal. 

At the age of 30 we moved to Tel Aviv. While I was adapting to a new life, I started sketching, and a friend taught me to look again and again, and keep noticing more details each time. I started going around with my pencils and timidly capture what was catching my attention. While I was also discovering Zen meditation, art became a mindfulness practice, as I had no particular talent or ambition in this field.

When I first set foot in Asia, on a humanitarian mission on the Tibet border, I started taking photos of the textiles, a truck driver with his white poodle, chinese herbs on a turquoise stall, or the mosuo matriarchy near the lake.

Eventually I took painting classes at the artist’s house in Tel Aviv and played with composition and persistency while discovering big Canvas and mixing colors with sand, paper, glue and more. I also got hooked on painting with other artists. 

My Surgical career took over, leaving just enough time for my meditation practice  and I didn’t touch these brushes for a few years, bringing back images from my travels in Japan, and the contemporary art shows, further humanitarian missions in Kenya or Myanmar, stocking memories or photos unsure when and if there will be space for art again.

The lockdown during the COVID crisis required me to temporarily stop  surgeries and while reflecting on the local and worldly challenges, I took out my old paint and brushes and reconnected with my creativity.

The uncertainty infusing our days, with the deep silence disturbed only by helicopters surveilling the nearby beach, inspired the paintings. Longing for company I joined a dance and creativity class online with people from all around the world. 

Dance became my muse and I love to paint in music, moving while exploring my inner landscape, as well as reflecting on the shatter of the world as we know it. It’s one of my ways of dealing with the limitations implied by the pandemics and its challenges!

The world is changing, deeply.  I paint and hope for our culture to awaken and change what needs to evolve and transform for us to become a sustainable civilization.

My calling is  strong today, so more space was created for my art, and it is time to come out, and show this change that is permanent, and more than ever relevant.

Part of the proceedings of this exhibition will be donated for social change in Israel.