Artists

Sylvie Selig

Press release

Nearly seventeen years after its first presentation, mor charpentier brings together once again, with Cinema Paradiso, Sylvie Selig’s series devoted to the seventh art. Comprising fourteen paintings made between 2002 and 2005, the series pays tribute to the filmmakers who have shaped the artist’s imagination, from Sofia Coppola to Wong Kar Wai, from Alfred Hitchcock to Jean-Luc Godard, as well as François Truffaut, Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch. Cinema Paradiso thus offers the opportunity to rediscover an essential body of work, in which cinema becomes at once a source of images, a territory of memory and a space of inner projection. The idea for this series stems from a deeply personal relationship with cinema. For Selig, films are not merely a repertoire of references, but a living material, capable of nourishing dreams and producing images that continue to exist beyond the screen. One of the first decisive moments came from Federico Fellini’s E la nave va, whose final scene, a rhinoceros drifting in a boat towards a mysterious black island, left a lasting impression on her and directly inspired one of her paintings. She later sent a photograph of the work to Fellini himself, who replied. This exchange seems to have opened the way to a broader project: to devote a series of paintings to the filmmakers who had played a major role in her imagination. Rather than illustrating their films or producing simple portraits, Sylvie Selig constructs her own cinematographic universe. She stages the directors as characters caught within her own scenarios, surrounded by writers, artists, composers, costume designers and fictional figures who have nourished or haunted their works. In this way, she weaves connections between cinema, literature, art history and personal memory, creating unexpected dialogues between images, texts and references. Her paintings function like montages, where each detail opens onto another story. The artist’s relationship with cinema began very early, during her childhood in Australia, where European and American films were screened in cinemas and festivals. These images became part of her visual education, nurturing a sensibility in which fiction, theatricality and memory would later play a central role. At the age of sixteen, she went to a film set in Melbourne to meet Elia Kazan and interview him for the Canadian radio programme Bonjour Dimanche. After returning to France in the 1960s, she settled in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the Paris of the Nouvelle Vague, where Jules et Jim, Le Mépris and Les Enfants du paradis became enduring references. Later, in New York, her involvement with the Living Theater opened her to the world of dramaturgy, while experimental cinema interested her as “an art form in its own right”, close to the formal, empirical and sensual experimentation of her own work. These fourteen directors occupy a particular place in her practice, not because they form an objective history of cinema, but because they belong to what Sylvie Selig describes as the screen of her own cinema. Her selection follows an intimate game of mirrors, guided by poetic, violent, strange or magical universes capable of resonating with her painting. In Alfred Hitchcock, Patricia Highsmith and Edward Hopper appear as essential figures in the director’s literary and visual universe. Elsewhere, she brings together Quentin Tarantino, Takeshi Kitano and Yohji Yamamoto, creating connections between cinema, fashion, violence, gesture and style. The filmmakers are therefore not represented from the outside: they are absorbed, displaced and replayed within the mental space of painting. The texts running along the canvases extend this process of montage. Quotations from writers, lines from films and literary fragments are kept in their original languages and function as echoes, sometimes ironic, always tender and admiring. They do not seek to explain the films, but rather to prolong their atmosphere, to introduce a rhythm of reading into the painted image and to open new layers of fiction. Through this dialogue between text and image, Selig asserts a singular position: that of a painter who also becomes a director, composing her own narratives from the traces left by cinema. The exhibition also includes a machine imagined by the artist, which extends the connection between her cinematic inspiration and the works that emerge from it. On a ten-metre-long canvas set in motion by a mechanical device, the painted narrative of a thwarted and rediscovered love story unfolds in a continuous scroll. After returning from New York in the 1980s, Selig settled in Paris near Place de Clichy and continued for many years to go to the cinema almost daily. Gradually, as she devoted herself entirely to painting, this ritual gave way to another form of projection. Cinema offered her images, atmospheres, stories and figures, but also a way of thinking about painting as a space of montage, displacement and invention. “Today, it is my own cinema that interests me,” she says. In Cinema Paradiso, this inner cinema becomes visible: a place where the memory of films is transformed into painting, where homage becomes creation, and where the screen of the imagination proves more powerful than the theatre itself.