FIND YOURSELF

Elisabeth Daynès

Loo & Lou Gallery - Haut Marais
05.06 - 23.07.20

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Elisabeth Daynès was born in 1960, and she currently lives and works in Paris. She is well known for her paleoart, and has exposed her sculptures in museums around the world, such as the Field Museum, Chicago; Perot, Dallas; Gyeonggi-do Jeongo Museum, Seoul; CosmoCaixa Science Museum, Barcelona; INAH, Mexico; Narodni Museum, Prague; Calouste Gulbekkian Foundation; Musée de l’Homme, Paris, etc.

For some dozens of years she has merged her scientific reconstructions with art, crossed by a reflection on the subject of the human figure in a contemporary world. Her first exhibition was dedicated to "La Vérité des Visages," or "the Truth of Faces," as she has began investigating identity and incarnation. She has followed these themes within a number of other exhibitions, such as Humans, Curieux face-à-face, Bouche B. In 2019, she participated in the art fair, "Art Up Lille," and displayed her work in two exhibitions: the first at la galerie du jour agnès b. in Paris, and the second at the 836M Gallery in San Francisco. In 2020, Loo & Lou Gallery welcomes the exhibition, "Find yourself."

For Elisabeth Daynès, the face is a place of mystery, the opposite of a simple surface that one could view as an ephemeral mask. In the piece Trash, abandoned faces are assembled in a multicolored mound, with red lips resembling flower petals that a distracted hand might have scattered. Fleeting masks that their owners had discarded, who were already taken by dreams of other faces. Here she questions if the lifespan of a face could be similar to one of a flower.

Faces or mirages? Versatile and volatile, these abandoned masks portray a measure of thirst for metamorphosis that agitates society. While science continues to offer us new possibilities, and the rewriting of oneself has become a planetary practice, the artist explores the limits of a future where appearance would be a ready-to-wear garment.

A face could be acquired in the same way and know the fate of any other object… that of being discarded. Elisabeth Daynès believes that the face is, on the contrary, the place for the expression of emotion and thought, as well as the the emergence of being. She embodies this in her hyperrealistic statues, which appear to be astonishingly real. This is made apparent by a plunge into an intense confrontation with lost identity. She expresses it in the woman peering the mirror in quest of her truth, or in the model with her closed eyes, signaling itself from her appeasement.

Poetics of the face are her focus: the celebration of the metaphysical power of a face in Identity, an ode to the vegetal in Les Ménines, and in the effervescent bouquets of blooming mouths. Focusing on one part of the body or the face, isolating and transforming it, Elisabeth Daynès has created surrealist fields of flowering red lips and breasts with tender shades of pink in an unusual nursery of mushrooms. She manages to sublimate anatomical detail by giving it poetic strength and creates an art in details where the detail becomes a world in itself. In this way, she teaches us that the face can become a landscape for those who know how to look at it…