Figures, heads, fragments. Duplicated, exaggerated, hidden, astonished. Solitary and silent beings.
Often multiple, always unique.

Who do these mysterious faces belong to?

Do they embody the different facets and personalities of an individual throughout his or her life? Or perhaps at a particular moment in time? Is this, from my childhood perspective, what I would like to become, or from my adult perspective, what the child I was, would have liked to become?
Perhaps it’s all of these things at once. Juliette Lepage Boisdron’s work can be understood as a representation of everything that makes us who we are: the multiplicity that inhabits us, the crossing of temporalities, a present that is difficult to grasp, always past and then future, already buried within us. Fantasies and realizations, freedoms and constraints, the dreams and realities of a single being: all this cohabits in the same body, and is projected by the artist’s gesture.

Faces of the soul and the essence of being.

In Juliette lepage Boisdron’s paintings, the eyes are wide open, often framed by a vivid blue or full black. They see far ahead, lost in a horizon that only they can perceive. They could have merged with or confronted the viewer’s gaze, but they don’t. They are never frontal. Never frontal, their gazes are always a little off, a little elsewhere. You can’t catch them.
Like the faces that wear them, they are elusive, and belong to an undefined world. Nomadic. A continuous, floating, gliding movement, akin to an essential part of Juliette Boisdron’s life: travel. It’s part of her work, but it’s also part of who she is, and always has been.

Each of his works evokes more than a mystery – it’s a journey of initiation. This is where the work and the artist come together.

Since childhood, Juliette’s life has been made up of journeys, of uprooting and rooting again, of resilience and resourcefulness, of learning all over again. Juliette Lepage Boisdron has always known how to create with finds, and this is what gives her art today, under the guise of apparent simplicity, a form of power. A naive art, always linked to an art of living, in which each fragment is linked to another, and becomes part of a harmonious whole.

The work is often framed, a theater where everything is played out and represented on the same level, right down to the void that contains the beings. The rule of equality prevails in Juliette Boisdron’s art. Each element has the same value. Simple and round, the strokes are thick, frequently doubled and, in short, only suggest greater complexity and nuance in what they delimit and reveal.

The work is surprising. It raises questions.

Where does symbolism fit in? Does each element in the painting refer to something else? Or does each form stand on its own merits? Does the fullness of the features evoke the multicultural depth of the work and life of the artist? For here, at the heart of these faces and figures, are we not at the crossroads of different artistic currents, and at the meeting point of Western and Eastern cultures? From the USSR to Abu Dhabi, by way of Manchuria, Juliette Boisdron has brought together, beyond her finds, the beliefs, cultures, landscapes and lives of another era and another age. World works.

Statuary laid down on rice paper, drawn in black ink and a few bright colors, the work retains a hieratic seriousness, but does not shy away from humor or, at times, provocation. Above all, it explores the mysteries of the soul through a mixture of surrealism and references to the sacred, mixing genres and eras and playing with symbols. Is cigarette smoke not a way of communing with the spirits or the afterlife? The smoke itself becomes a grotesque mask, or a fog in which we lose ourselves… As for the omnipresent eye, its characteristic features are reminiscent of ancient Egyptian iconography, just as much as it refers to the third eye, which also transcends many cultures and eras.

Juliette Lepage Boisdron’s worlds are also gardens. And cultivated ones: figures watering plants towering over a head, taking us back to the cycle of life, but at the same time urging us to grow, intellectually and spiritually.

To cultivate ourselves. To blossom.

These are also gardens in which beings evolve discreetly, almost hiding themselves. We can glimpse them among the luxuriant vegetation, but also alongside exotic animals, also seen as if in a dream: elephant trunks wind endlessly, tigers stand like men… scenes that seem to be part of a narrative that continues off-screen. A story to be invented, to be continued.

Works that shine.

Juliette Boisdron’s worlds are also full of messages, drawing our attention, through comical scenes, to societal issues rooted in the present day. The interrelationship between men and women, adults and children, and the relationship with flora and fauna are recurring themes. The image of women and their role in society are also key themes for the artist, particularly in the jewelry that Juliette Lepage Boisdron paints, but which she also sculpts. Large, monumental and constraining necklaces appear in her paintings, reminding us of the obligation to ‘fit in’ and the injunction to everyone to look the same.

It is here the artist’s challenge lies: to conceive a Work as an ode to dissimilarity, each work as a celebration of individuality.

At the junction between the territories of the soul, between dream and reality, memory and contemporaneity.

Caroline Boudehen

Writer and Journalist