8 hours with Rachel Marsil in Lille
Born in Lille, French artist Rachel Marsil is full of color and vividness.
Graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs de Paris and developed an artistic language at the crossroads of textile design and painting. Her multidisciplinary work deals with questions of identity and the representations that can be linked to it.
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At the border between memories and dreams, Rachel Marsil plunges us into an intimate and colorful universe in which interior scenes, moments of reunion, subtle latency of the pose before the click of the photo are entangles.
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Influenced by Paul Gauguin or Emile Bernard, while adopt an aesthetic reminiscent of the West African studio photographs of the 1960s, from which the artist draws inspiration in both poses and outfits.
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A set of supple silhouettes inhabit the space of the canvases, they seem to be immersed in contemplative waiting.
Their gaze is turned towards us peacefully, their faces are hypnotic and their features, similar from one character to another remain unique. They seem to look beyond the visible into a world of the subconscious in which we take part.
Those who know Rachel personally will perhaps recognise her face in the characters. The canvas is like a mirror in which to explore one’s identity. Originally, Rachel Marsil dives into her family photographs; each scene is an opportunity to revisit a memory, sometimes even to reinvent it.
For the artist, painting is a narrative of a larger personal story where history with a capital H, intimate history and fantasized vision mix. Faced with the flaws of our memory, dreams and projections are powerful poetic tools. Everything in the paintings contributes to plunge us into a state in-between.
Some elements nevertheless keep us from the risk of absolute onirism; in particular the objects that adds to the paintings. Rachel Marsil represents them in the same way as the characters, making them protagonists of the visual narrative in their own right. Finally, she adds a semantic charge that is far too pressing to be invented: the objects carry a sensitive and memorial weight. They crystallise as many moments as emotions experienced by the artist and at the same time send us back into our own intimate sphere contemplating our own Proust’s madeleine and our own forgetfulness.
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Le goût de la mangue [The taste of mango].
The fruit of love here takes the form of a mango, in delicate balance, appear as allegories of the long and sometimes delicate growth of love as described by the American writer Bell Hooks.
The hand crafted straw piece recall the artist's initial training in textile design.
Rachel Marsil also moved away from portraiture and scenes of intimacy, with works that tended towards an initial form of abstraction, in particular the depiction of plates and food on geometric backgrounds made up of arabesques and curves.
