Aurélie Salavert: Secret Garden
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PRESS RELEASE
“Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.”
-- Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1911), 300.
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Inventive, evocative, and shimmering, Aurélie Salavert’s works sidestep categorical constraints and defy traditional modes of meaning-making. In fact, Aurélie declines to date her work, refusing to anchor her art to the confines of time. Why should she? Her interests lie beyond the scope of the demonstrable, the perceptible, and the legible, but not at the expense of her aesthetic attunement to simplicity and lightness.
Using found materials, Aurélie creates from visions. She says, “an image appears in my mind without me asking for it,” so her compositions always bear a trace of the phantasmal, and of spontaneity. This selection of twenty-four works, aptly titled Secret Garden, attests to recurring thematic and formal concerns: portraits, landscapes, creatures, and abstractions. Fantasy and mysticism characterize each drawing and painting, even her representations of subjects from everyday life.
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Autrefois
watercolor, gouache and pencil on chipboard7 1/2 x 6 in
19 x 15 cm -
Inspired by the infinite possibilities and absolute freedom that imagination offers, Aurélie calls her art “a playground of surprises.” When I picture Aurélie’s secret garden, I think of this playground of surprises as a remix of the medieval hortus conclusus. In its strictest sense, a hortus conclusus is an enclosed garden for the Biblical Virgin and Child, or at least for a chaste and demure maiden. Sometimes they’re joined by a group of female saints, a crowd of angels, or perhaps a unicorn. Rife with symbolic and allegorical intention beyond the scope of the “real,” the presence of the hortus conclusus in secular illustrations of unicorn hunts points to its mysterious and enchanting appeal that exceeds its Biblical origins.The hortus conclusus, transcendent and independent, is a space of magic, beauty, abundance, and indeterminacy. Enigmatic, alluring, and sacred, Aurélie’s enclosed garden cultivates florae, faunae, hybridity, connection, and jubilance. An anthropomorphized daisy waves (Thank You All for Reactivating the World in Beauty); a pink horse rears underneath oversized ball-point pen stars (Impermanence); a peaceful and ghostly face floats amongst bright, vibrant blossoms and blooms, part Veil-of-Veronica and part botanical study (Contemplation). Humanoid figures recline amid mischievous and playful black birds (Crossing) or find themselves enveloped in the plush warmth of numerous enormous cats (Boudoir). Scintillating metallics and glitter add an extra dash of the marvelous, as a veiled being emits golden rays from their eyes (Breath of Eternity), two owls perch beside a sparkling azure waterfall (Absolute Secret of Deepest Waterfall), and three impish acrobats stacked atop one another adorn themselves in gleaming costumes (Just This Again).With these dazzling and metamorphosing scenes, Aurélie welcomes us into her secret garden, where we too may experience the affective forces of enchantment, astonishment, and amazement. Aurélie invites us to be receptive to the marvelousness of our world, seen and unseen, material and immaterial.- Kendall DeBoer
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Contemplation
pencil and watercolor on chipboard5 1/2 x 10 3/4 in
14 x 27 cm -
“A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. / Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates with pleasant fruits, henna with spikenard, / spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices / a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.” / “Awake, O north wind, and come, thou south! Blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits.”
- Song of Songs 4:12-16, 21st Century King James Version
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Red crystal (Cristal Rouge)
watercolor and pencil on paper10 3/4 x 8 1/4 in
27 x 21 cm -
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REAL DREAM
gouache and pencil on paper9 x 8 1/4 in
23 x 21 cm -
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Impermanence
pen, pastel and watercolor on primed chipboard8 1/4 x 11 3/4 in
21 x 30 cm -
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Portrait of the artist as a young girl
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Featured Writer
Kendall DeBoer is a Providence-based curator and art historian specializing in craft, surrealisms, and outlier art. She is a PhD Candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, and a curatorial assistant in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her expertise includes unconventional materials like cellophane, tinsel, ribbons, and other party favors.
