Emilie Pauly

Self-taught artist, I started painting in 2014, a few years after the birth of my son. The path that led me to painting? Basically the need to escape a boring professional life, to reconnect with my childhood dreams at a time when I had lost myself, and the desire to bring fantasy to everyone (young and old). I was fascinated by the beautiful illustrations discovered in the youth albums that I read to my child, and I wanted to create my own images, my own paintings, which would tell my inner world, my dreams, my fantasies, my ideals. I wanted to paint what moved me so that I could never forget it, to keep a memory that I could transmit, communicate. I wanted to paint to reconcile myself with a life in which I did not really recognize myself, to find who I was, finally. Accept the past, understand the present that flows from it and love it. Because beauty is everywhere, and because it is always possible to rewrite the history of one’s life.  When I create characters with pencil, I never know what I’m going to draw. I let my hand go and then see what appears. I like not knowing where my gesture is going to lead me. I like being surprised by what comes out of the first strokes. I have the pleasant feeling of accessing something of myself that was lost (in my unconscious or in my distant memories, what do I know?). When I have gathered a large number of drawings, I look for those that could be assembled in the same scene, the characters who could live adventures together within the same painting. I spend a lot of time creating these compositions. When I discovered which characters have things to say and in which setting they could evolve, I move on to painting. Everything is made of acrylic. Painting and drawing appeared to me as more reliable means of expression, more powerful than texts and speeches. Linguist by training, I worked on words and the construction of meaning for a long time when I was preparing my doctoral thesis. Polysemy in languages is sometimes so dizzying! If I have remained sensitive to the poetry of literary works and the beauty of well-conducted arguments, these move me less today than the poetry or the beauty of images. Words, sometimes misleading or source of misunderstanding, never colorful enough or on the contrary too saturated, can not convey everything. When we no longer know what to say or how to say it, when words are missing, when silence is imposed, painting, sculpture, music or dance can take over, for the pleasure of all. Where words and languages separate us, art finally brings us together.