Silvia Calmejane & Marine De Soos: Travels to faraway lands

Spontaneous and instinctive, Silvia Calmejane's artistic gesture is thought to be in the continuity of the "raw" avant-gardes that inspired her drawing practice. The world of the French artist is raw, powerful and vulnerable at the same time. Her paintings constantly confront the viewer with his own gaze. In this face-to-face encounter with the characters that populate her world, she seeks to capture the power of "non-reproduction". Influenced by Basquiat, Rauschenberg or Combas, the work of Silvia Calmejane remains nonetheless very personal. In each of her compositions, she scatters traces of her history, her travels or her inspirations with the brush. Paper, wood, Plexiglas, glue and paint - the mixed media artist we discovered fifteen years ago never ceases to explore new horizons, most recently abstraction.

Born in 1965 in the South of France, Silvia Calmejane studied art in Paris (live model, oil painting, watercolor) before starting a career in advertising. After several years, she decided to devote herself entirely to painting. She then left the capital to return to her native Basque country, where she lives and works to this day. Silvia Calmejane's paintings have great success in France and abroad. Her work is exported to London, Milan, Singapore and Hong Kong. In 2006, she won the "Contemporary Creation" prize of the Saraleguinea Museum for the painting "Smile".

Marine de Soos evokes the possible pursuit of the impossible, the suspension of time. Her sculptures thus draw from the sources of geography and history: whether they are inspired by the wise men of Africa and Indonesia, or by the women with their ancestral gestures and queen-like figures through
the centuries, this artist excels in the restitution of distant emotions that she makes immediately palpable to us. We thus share the serenity of these small fishermen on stilts, fragile and loose miniatures captured in Indonesia, of these Maasai shepherds immobile with gentleness, of this man from Cape Verde still full of childhood. We are trying to unravel the mystery of Burmese, Maasai women, healers, whose faces pass through us but do not see us, trapped in an improbable world that belongs only to them. Marine de Soos' work has been expressing  for twenty years a nostalgic poetry which, in this materialist world of the XXIst century, is rich in meaning.

Born in 1967 in Paris, Marine de Soos spent a part of her childhood in Africa, whose influence can be seen in her work. Back in Paris, where she now lives and works, she started to work in marketing before devoting herself to sculpture in 1991.