Born 1970 in Montpellier, Emmanuelle Villard lives and works in Paris. “Emmanuelle Villard is a painter, and what she paints is almost
always
tableaux. To besure, they are not necessarily
flat rectangular panels, as tradition would have it,
but they are invariably unusual objects, designed to catch the
eye and focus the attention for a period of time that it is up
to each viewer to determine. Otherwise put, we can carry on
calling them pictures in a day and age when painting occurs
in accordance with broadened forms and in an expanded
field. We might even say that the three-dimensional objects,
be they placed or hung, which she has been producing since
2004-2005, calling them
Objets visuels (
Visual Objects),
are as much
pictures as
sculptures, because what matters
in them is, first and foremost, the coloured surface. Her
oeuvre is deeply rooted in the 1990s, a decade which saw
the emergence of a practice of abstraction combining the
legacy of the 1960s and 1970s, which emphasized the material
process of picture making, and the legacy of the 1980s,
which recognized that an iconic dimension was unavoidable,
that everything in a picture had to be perceived as an image,
including that material process (a drop of paint has become
the image of a drop of paint). Her work has since developed
in an autonomous way, not without linking up with and
anticipating the issues more generally raised by the art world
of the 2000s, especially those which take into account a play
activity aspect and a new way of artistically grasping the
questions raised by recent trends in women's studies.” (
Eric de Chassey)
