Still life with Ink (2013) Painting by Hélène Rallo

VISUAL ARTIST

2011 Goldsmiths University of London, Londres, UK

PGCE – Postgraduate Certificate in Education in Art and Design

2005 ESAD – Ecole Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, Strasbourg, France

DNSEP – Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique

Hélène Rallo’s work takes the viewers to strange places, from being something like a recognizable reality to something magical. Viewing her drawings or her paintings is a disorientating experience of perpetual scene-shifting. What is evident is the importance she attaches to subject – not as narrative, but as a threshold of the viewer’s experience. The visual dialectic is enacted in many ways within the imagery and materiality of her paintings, not least in the relationship between the photographic source and its painterly transformation into an imagined subject.

“The act of painting is integral to how I seek to recognize and stave off the movement and slippage that occur in the process of forgetting and remembering events, places or people. The significance of the painting is neither a site nor a story but a feeling."

Drawing and painting are ways to renew images and construct autonomous visions which belong neither to fact nor fiction, just another way of telling story whose unfolded plots can be neither predicted nor whose endings can be foretold.

She refers to virtual memory as a memory in the process of its incidental appearance or reappearance, dreamlike, without a fixed identity.

Such memory operates forwards and back, an image in formation.

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : 1982
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists