Isabelle Becker

It was at the School of Fine Arts in Toulon that Isabelle Becker discovered and finally adopted (among others) this material that is clay thanks to teachers Odile Rosso and Henri Comby. She has lived in Valette du Var since June 2018. In her artistic approach, at the start there is a cafe taken in a bar of which she poured the rest on a page of her notebook. This coffee stain, gives birth to a gesture and becomes a drawing out of his imagination. At this moment she was no longer dependent on reality and a possible "subject to draw"; This stain on his leaf avoided him "the anxiety of the blank page". She continued this work in her workshop where on larger supports, after observation, formats are covered with faces, characters who only have the fact of occupy the same surface. All these creatures are confined to a kind of chaos that have neither low nor high sometimes. They are expressive, fun, disturbing according to what goes through his head. She has this obsession with the human figure, this part of the body intrigues it, questions it; She is looking for what can be hidden behind this mobile mask, sometimes changing misleading. She admits to feeling a kind of fascination for "beings". And she feels this need to project her obsessions, thoughts, anxieties, existential questions on an unknown figure. Its "involuntary models" are rarely beautiful in the aesthetic sense but often these are "gules", real, anonymous, onlookers, passers -by. At the start, she uses the "dripping" technique (let the color drop it) for the background, then she makes projections, drips and spots on the support (marouflaged paper on wood or canvas, canvas, etc.). The starting point is a "gestural abstraction" which becomes a support for its figurative graphic expression rendered using a roting (China ink). The materials used to make these stains and these "traces" are inks, dyes, or anthropometric fingerprints. These achievements are presented surrounded by a black wooden frame and the drawing is laminated on a rigid support. Regarding the terracotta sculptures which she calls "Terracotta", she models her works sculpted directly in a block of clay or sandstone by favoring the so -called "wire cutting the butter" to keep a raw and massive appearance. Here again it is the attitude and expression of the body that inspire it. The parts are cooked (cookie) for the first time, then partially enameled. A second pass in the oven will allow the enamel or the Engobes to be fixed. Thus the surface of the volume made will obtain a more or less brilliant appearance (ceramic).