le petit domestique Painting by Somotho Jess

"My first drawing-related memory dates back to my early childhood, when sitting on the stairs of a house that I no longer live in, I applied myself to drawing horses. I still have this drawing, and it no longer resembles the one I saw with my child's eyes...

Then I continued to draw, paint and write, sometimes mixing these ingredients in my compositions, because my work is above all narrative.

Two themes interest me in particular: one touches on proving the surrounding world, often through small anecdotal details that become central subjects, and the second on reinventing a world whose logic and construction are dreamed of.

In the latter, a large Far Eastern imprint is deliberately left and generously colors my productions. But the whole is largely autobiographical, as a way of simply admitting to being at the center of one's own world, a sort of metaphorical reconciliation with one's navel, because the artists speak above all of themselves to speak of the world.



The series on the theme of the dog is particularly interested in the animal in what it embodies of domesticity but also of unpredictable force, rage, instinct, savagery. Sometimes dog or wolf, strangely included in the frame, or escaping from it, painting as it is used in its expressionist style tends to impact on the deep nature of the animal world which is not without recalling the ambivalent nature of the man. This world shared unequally between modern man and the source of his origins, this is what the space of the canvas and the sometimes emphatic gesture of the painter tell us. »







Born in 1982, under a completely different surname, Somotho pursued studies in applied arts, before teaching them in a Parisian high school, while continuing her artistic activities in parallel. Her workshop-laboratory, which she also sometimes transforms into an apartment and which she shares with a dog, a cat and two imaginary goldfish, is the place for multiple experiments, which lie between the observation of the real world, and a rewriting of this one, in perpetual motion.

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