Brigitte Aubignac
Born in 1957 in Boulogne Billancourt, France
The subject of Brigitte Aubignac's work is essential to "paint the emotions". Exploring every day, the unusual, while making reference of a mirror game in a back and forth between past and present as in the FAUNES series or in the MAQUILLAGES series, where the faces of women are painted facing the mirror of appearances where malice and humor borders on cruelty making them close and intimate to us. Her work thus presents itself, in the form of themes, of parts that succeed each other by the need to deepen the new approach that the subject worked provoked in her as the evolution of her painting progressed. A whole journey in fact personal in a back-and-forth between history and her own experiences through intimate and never spectacular emotions.
The fauns are recognizable by their hooves and pointed ears, they skate on the sidewalks, go to the swimming pool, are bored on a sofa: these are the city fauns, who closely resemble the young people of today. Their rural cousins are trying to survive despite electric fences, waste reception centers and land use planning. They play the flute perched on pipes. They no longer pursue the nymphs, probably because they disappeared before them. He's still a faun, but she dreams of Hollywood and thinks she is Lolita. Brigitte Aubignac, whose exhibitions are too rare, resuscitates these mythological creatures with a fluid and sober painting, slightly vibrant, without easy effects. This is not to pay homage to ancient art, although she knows it by heart, but to invent allegories of today's world, fables of the disappearance of nature and the loneliness of metropolises. To these recent canvases, the exhibition joins some from previous years, notably two diptychs of which makeup - that is to say, lying - is the subject. Aubignac's painting is therefore perfectly contemporary.