KNIFE Maryse-Anne
Self-taught, Maryse-Anne Couteau has always been drawing. The pencil has long been her favorite work tool and she still uses this technique, which is not very widespread among adults, which is colored pencils. For a few years, however she has also been working in ink.
His first productions, very lightly colored and with very fine graphics, managed to suggest volume with a black line slightly underlined with color. Then the color imposed itself more and more and ended up supplanting the line. The initially very assertive tones have become more refined. It is by superimposing the layers of color that the artist obtains the mixtures and nuances which are one of the characteristics of his work.
Although the body and the human face occupy a large place in her universe, Maryse-Anne Couteau does not limit herself to any style or type of representation, featuring objects as well as animals or characters. It is in reality that the artist finds an inexhaustible source of inspiration, while the fertility of his imagination and his keen sense of observation intertwine a surprising inner world and a precise and detailed reality.
In his unusual compositions one can guess the impossible desire to get as close as possible to the object, as if to reach its very essence. The overlaps, shifts, transparencies of surfaces that are actually opaque, the repetition of shapes at different scales or the modification of the angle of view on the same object thus testify to a gaze that would like to see higher and deeper, to embrace the subject in its totality instead of being limited to the face it offers, to see further by projecting it into the future and the past, to go under the surface of things in order to go beyond the limit which traces the contours and to join the infinite richness that each element of reality hides.
After studies and a professional life that had nothing to do with art, Maryse-Anne Couteau decided to devote herself entirely to drawing and has devoted herself to her passion for nearly 30 years.
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Artist presented by the Art and Miss Gallery - Paris