French artist Amandine Urruty will be opening next week “Little Secrets”, her latest solo show at PlasticMurs gallery in Valencia, Spain.
Urruty’s wonderfully bizarre illustrations feature dream-like characters and situations always quietly arranged, but contrasted with a certain commotion around them. Drawn using graphite, her characters seem suspended in time part of an alternative universe sprung from the artist’s childhood memories and dreams. From the press release:
The games chest of Amandine Urruty
If there were a physical place where all elements of the visual culture of a person were put away, it would surely be a lot like one of those trunks that we filled with toys and the most disjointed childhood treasures. It would be a dark and exciting place from which to draw, groping and almost by chance, that precious object that we would spend playing with for the rest of the afternoon. Over the years, the trunk would be nourished by images, as Proust’s Madeleine, it would evoke a range of emotions linked to our memo- ries, to our happy times and to our recurring fears. Gradually, our chest would be refined with elements of high culture such as the Cinquecento landscapes, scenes of Hieronymus Bosch or their by the covered faces of René Magritte which, without replacing the previous memories, would mix with references to popular culture such as the Muppets, the Garbage Pail Kids or the universe of Miyazaki. That strange confluence would accidentally cause the most curious juxtapositions and associations of the most absurd ideas.
Let’s say this hypothetical chest belonged to someone like Urruty Amandine (Toulouse, 1982), an artist who, since childhood, has used drawing as a fun antidote to boredom. As an exercise in automatic writing, all this imagery would swirl in variegated scenes, filled with recognizable icons and invented characters interacting with each other as Lautréamont’s sewing machine and umbre- lla on the dissecting table: uncomfortable and decontextualized but evoking a suggestive dialogue. If so, this unsettling bestiary that emerged spontaneously from the Urruty’s chest, would have been created excluding any mediation of reason in the creative process and giving rise to all possible interpretations that, coinciding or not with those of the artist, would be as valid as diverse for each spectator or for the same spectator at different times and moods.
For even more capricious fantasizing, imagine that the artist used a simple tool such as graphite, forcing us to see her own world in grayscales; a swaying world, as she would say, “between the Baroque elegance and gross vulgarity”. If such a thing happened, we could take delight with every detail of the drawing with the assurance that each new viewing would surprise us. All this would happen if, as Urruty, we would more often search for games in our chest and we would unabashed abandon ourselves to the dream of reason. – Manuel Garrido
“Little Secrets” opens on December 11th and will run until January 21st at the gallery located on Calle Denia 45, Valencia, Spain.
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
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