Emmanuelle Levesque

At the age of 12, during a visit to the Tate Gallery in London, Emmanuelle encountered the first paintings that made her want to paint. The paintings of Van Gogh and Francis Bacon, and the colours of the Fauves and the Expressionists profoundly affected her, and the young artist lived a truly poetic experience. She decided to attend a fine arts workshop outside her regular school curriculum, and after receiving a high school diploma in the arts, she joined the School of Fine Arts.
She studied drawing and preferred figurative painting initially. The light of the Brittany coast, always changing and capricious, was a source of inspiration and desires for her. After painting from nature and photos, she decided to give free rein to her imagination and to trust the colours as her only medium, and thus she moved definitively to abstraction.
On a trip to Russia she met many passionate artists (musicians, actors, filmmakers), and on returning to France, she became a schoolteacher. The overwhelming artistic imagination of children taught her much and this experience helped her to affirm her own colours as her ‘joie de vivre’. She then devoted herself entirely to painting.
Today, Emmanuelle uses a knife to maintain a crude gesture, structure the space and give more intensity and energy to the colours. She has chosen abstraction and now, released from the subject, she has become interested in the work of abstract painters from the Parisian School. She particularly likes the colour saturation and sometimes shocking contrasts. Meanwhile, she also admires clean and poetic work. Open to exploring techniques, Emmanuelle shows a predilection for oil painting, which she continually returns to. She develops her own pigments and tries to find new relationships of colour.
Following on from the thought of Kandinsky, Emmanuelle never strays from the spirituality of colour and art.