trio (1999) Collages by Celeste Tavares (ETY)

Céleste Tavarez (aka ETY) hails from Capo Verde. She was born and raised in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, until she was 11 years old, when she moved permanently to Paris, France.

Celeste believes that « Life, and its inherent wanderment, is the ideal canvas for inspiration ».

Naturally, she became an airline attendant, or « professional wanderer » as she likes to call herself.

Her sources of inspiration are quite varied, and she cites Jacques Villéglé, Gerhard Richter, Saul Leiter, Miles Davis, Cesaria Evora, Senec, Boris Vian and Pierre Daco as her muses. A self-taught artist, she likes to work with paper, especially derelict posters she finds on the walls of subway stations: She collects them, wrinkles them, rips and cuts them apart, to glue them back together as she paints, sculpts, and writes with them. Her true focus is how matter interacts.

Céleste composes with everything that inspires her, as she meets new people and discovers new lands, absorbing moments, colors, vibrations and rhythms.

From this bounty, she collects and steals away matter and materials like an Exquisite Corpse game, which she assembles and disassembles, accumulates, modulates and manipulates. She juxtaposes et composes to create a vision with rhythm and narration.

Diversity, multi-culturalism, effervescence, happenstance, instantaneity and instinct create her abstract collages, like a an infinite dialogue between matter and light, shape and concept, old and new, organic and plastic.

For Céleste, « we are all a collage, steeped in our histories, encounters, emotions, and reflec-x-tions… »

From her encounter with singer and beatboxer Sly Johnson is born a series of pieces.

The challenge was to translate graphically Sly Johnson’s music as collages, in a 40cm x 40cm format like a classic record.

This challenge is right up Céleste’s alley, as she enthusiastically undertakes it to fulfill what she had always wanted to do without allowing herself to: Interpreting and etch into her art the music she loves, a mad idea to sample on a canvas.

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : 1971
• Artistic domains: Works by professional artists,
• Groups: Professional Artist Contemporary French Artists