Text by Éléonore Gros
Ellen Akimoto engages in a true dialogue with the space by installing a large wallpaper with organic but enigmatic patterns, whose colours gradually reverse from one side of the gallery to the other. Through this optical effect, the artist sets into motion a mesmerising and disruptive movement, creating a rift in space-time. Lost in the cosmic sprawl, the gaze somehow seeks for the tangible, the known, as it encounters the familiar environments and objects of everyday life depicted in the paintings nearby.
When examined more closely, the sceneries and subjects appear uneasy and distorted. The bodies are frozen in time, awaiting some future resolution, in strange and unsightly poses. These mise en scènes seem directly extracted from those moments of Hitchcock movies, when the lead actress begins to understand the horrific situation she’s in. These freeze-frames leave our consciousness in a distrustful expectation of a before or an after without offering a straightforward narrative. The keys to the enigma lie in the details.
Ellen Akimoto’s work is characterised by structured combinations of shapes and a large range of colours that underlie her creative process. The artist most often begins her compositions by making a digital collage using images she has gleaned from the Internet and photographs of her own body. Whilst the initial arrangement is made on the computer, the final assembly takes place on the canvas, the paint providing her what is necessary in terms of colour and materiality in order to build even more complex narratives.
She uses different techniques — from oil to acrylic — that allow her to play with light and create disorienting perspectives and depths on the canvas. In this series of paintings, the architectural elements — walls, windows, floors — in the background are recognisable but look slightly peculiar and fragmented, raising doubts about their origins and existences. On the contrary, the surrounding objects — furniture, tablecloth, tapestries, fishbowl, plants — as well as the figures in the foreground, are painted with great detail and accuracy.
Ellen Akimoto sets naturalistic tones in opposition to surrealistic hues that allow her to convey messages and emotion. The bodies reveal themselves in a juxtaposition of unnatural and saturated colours. They seem to have been painted according to a thermal spectrum, ranging from deep blacks and muddied greyish blues to smoky reds, including pinkish and greenish pastels. The hands and feet turn to bright blue and intense red, revealing the importance of the transformation and evolution of the subjects.
The large canvases depict aspects of the human condition, figures on the brink of nausea, sometimes even on the edge of death: a solitary woman sitting between shadows and unnatural brightness, an excorporising death sublimation in which identity is erased in the process, a sudden encounter with oneself... Even the plants are dried out and a goldfish swims with its ghostly doppelganger. In this exhibition, Ellen Akimoto reveals another side of her work tinted in an obscure and mystical aura, acknowledging the indescribable and the invisible, spinning between the familiar and the fantastic, the personal and the universal, between life and death.