ARGUMENT (VERSION ANGLAISE) n°11 - Page 1 - 11 Visuel en 2nd of cover (above) : Isabelle Vialle, Dryade, oil on canva, 130 x 110 cm, 2024 Visuel in 1st of cover: Roberta Coni, Diletta 22 , 140x100cm 2018 Argument | 3 Argument Artistic and literary magazine The art magazine that gives artists a voice Argument www.revue-argument.fr N°11, January, February, March 2025 Quarterly publication Price per issue: €25.00 Subscription: €90 PDF version: €7Subscription: €20 Editorial Committee Adeline Bailleux-Benabdallah Axelle Delorme Paul Escudier Rachel Hardouin Filly di Somma Eduardo Pérez Viloria Alexandre Ortiz Hervias Kim Chi Pho Contributors Jennifer Lemoy: Graphic designer Léa Rimoux: Graphic designer Claire Savouré: Proofreader Audrey Boon: Website Michèle Simonot: Web proofreader Publishing Director François Beauxis-Aussalet redaction@revue-argument.fr ISSN no.: 2825-9319 Legal registration date: 14 June 2022 Printer Pixartprinting S.p.A. Via 1° Maggio, 830020 Quarto d'Altino VE, Italia Publisher Association Revue Argument Artistic and literary publication Head office: 1 bis, rue Gambetta 64200 Biarritz Association under the law of 1901, registered on 29 January 2022 with the S/P of Bayonne N°W641013330 / Siren 910237510 Its purpose is to publish art magazines in any physical or digital medium, to organise art exhibitions in any physical or digital venue, to produce and publish artistic or literary programmes in any digital or broadcast medium, and to take any action necessary to carry out the foregoing activities. Editorial An issue to celebrate spirituality! Argument magazine presents its eleventh issue on the theme of spirituality. The end of this year is marked by the renewal of wars, violent ideologies and suffering. In this issue, you will discover nine talented artists who we hope will bring you comfort and hope. Sabine André-Donnot Roberta Coni Emma Lapassouze Frédéric Léglise Samantha Ornon Julien Signolet Stefania Strouza Isabelle Vialle Hani Zurob The Argument magazine project was born of the idea of bringing together works of art, an audience of readers and artists, present through interviews, and conceiving the whole thing as a collective exhibition by placing the artists at the centre of the subject. You won't find any advertising here, a deliberate choice to maintain our independence. You can buy the print version on the magazine's website and the digital versions on the Cafeyn, PressReader, Magzter, Readly, Scopalto and Kono Magazine platforms. We are distributed in bookshops by Les Petits Editeurs and are listed in the Electre and Dilicom catalogues. We want to create a direct link between the public, the works and the artist. It's the artists who count above all: They write the world with matter, They share their visions and dreams with us, playing with shapes and colours. They radiate poetry, wisdom and emotion. We look forward to seeing you every quarter with a new issue or special issues. I hope you enjoy your reading, and wish you all the happiness and joy of the New Year! François Beauxis-Aussalet Publishing director 4 | Argument Contents Isabelle Vialle 06 22 Hani Zurob 34 44 Stefania Strouza Roberta Coni 62 Emma Lapassouze Argument | 5 Julien Signoret 72 112 List of works 94 Samantha Ornon 84 Frédéric Léglise 104 Sabine AndréDonnot 6 | Argument 1 Portrait of the artist in his studio, 2024 → In the inexhaustible dialogue between the visible and the invisible, between the material and the spiritual, lies the work o f Isabelle Vialle, a French artist whose work seems to inhabit an intermediate territory between the concrete and the evanescent. Isabelle is a creator who defies the limits of perception, transporting us into a world where Form, colour and texture are not simply visual elements, but expressions of a profoundly existential quest. Eduardo Pérez Viloria Venezuelan writer, poet and broadcaster Isabelle Vialle Argument | 7 8 | Argument Isabelle Vialle ↑ 2 Fleur de marais, oil on canvas, 86 x 62 cm, 2024 Argument | 9 From her very first steps in the art world, Isabelle Vialle has cultivated her own language, forged by her experiences, her reading and, above all, her philosophical preoccupations. Trained in the plastic arts and at the Beaux-Arts in Lille and Rennes, and influenced by Expressionism and Symbolism, Isabelle constantly questions the nature of reality and the human being. She transcends conventional representation, exploring the notion of the indefinable, that which can only be grasped through art. Throughout her career, Isabelle Vialle has followed not only the traditional paths of art, exhibiting her work in renowned galleries and museums, but also a personal path of reflection and self-exploration. His pictorial approach and his ability to transform the intangible into a visual discours lead us to question the very nature of our perception, in a dialectical game that invites us to confront the elusive. Isabelle is not only an artist in the aesthetic sense of the word; she is also a visual thinker, an observer of the depths of the human soul and the enigma of eternity. In each of her works, the viewer is faced with an essential paradox: the attempt to capture the essence of a constant flow that, i n a way, reflects us all. Every line, every texture in his work opens a window onto the sublime, revealing traces of an introspection that transcends the individual, offering a poetic vision of existence. This interview will be a window into Isabelle Vialle's intellectual and sensitive universe. We will delve into the motivations and dilemmas that permeate her work, exploring how her artistic practice becomes an act of resistance to contemporary superficiality, and a profond song to the complexity of the human condition. In dialogue with her creations, Isabelle will reveal not only her process, but also her vision of universal human choices: time, identity, and each person's relationship with that mystery we call reality. Your work seems to convey an intimate connection between humans and nature. How do you see the interaction between the two in your art, and how has this relationship evolved over the course of your career? It's like a fermenting root. When I started out a few years ago, I was painting hypertrophied Venuses in ochre tones, a projected image of what I probably felt was me, then I detached myself from colour to evolve towards a more ascetic range of greys that echoed my environment, that was still me, only to return to colour much later. Geographical and psychological changes have influenced my work, and often even provoked it. I lived in Northern Greece near fields of olive trees, and some of the thousand-year-old trees with their twisting branches spoke to me of our human lives. Everything is intertwined; we are made up of what surrounds us, of our encounters, of what touches us, enthuses us, revolts us or hurts us. In the words of Georges Didi-Huberman: "Between me and space, there is only my skin. It's a receptacle, an imprint of the world around me that sculpts me". That's what painting is, it's being painting, it's being skin, it's being a fermenting root. The use of materials in your pieces seems to have symbolic importance. How do you choose the elements you work with, and what do they represent for you in the context of your artistic vision? The choice of material is not neutral: it has to be handled in a way that resonates with the body. I've sometimes exchanged 'recipes' with other artists, but to no avail, because as long as there isn't this personal appropriation to link something of the body to it, the material remains without resonance. It takes a long time to get to grips with it before it resonates. I've experimented with different materials, provoked accidents in the play of flat tints and grainy reliefs, explored oil, pastel, tempera, acrylic, tar, collage, and many other ingredients whose names I don't know, with no connection whatsoever to the material stamped 'Fine Art': slag and dust of all kinds. I'm still experimenting, and I love paint and all the fiddling you can do with it. At the moment, I'm very classical and enjoy the smoothness of oil, but I could explore more and never have the time. More often than not, I have several paintings in progress to avoid that terrifying moment of the blank canvas. Any pretext is good for postponing this confrontation. Setting up a background allows me to find the colours and light in which a shape will appear, but this appearance will unbalance the background; then the shape will, in turn, develop its own universe. It's an alternation of appearances and disappearances: one can only come about by erasing the other, and so on. It's as if my task, in the end, was simply to find a balance, to order the material and reach that moment when it's time t o stop. This matter-chaos collects the gestures and leaves a little of the buried traces of oneself, which rise to the surface of the canvas. 10 | Argument Isabelle Vialle It's often said that art is a way of transforming suffering into beauty. Do you see your creative process as reflecting an inner or emotional transformation? Life is a fragile, miraculous order, and confronting the imbalance of that order is violent. I started painting more than twenty years ago, when my father began to fall ill. He stopped recognising me, oblivion invaded my space and plunged me into deep confusion; a part of me disappeared. I felt the need to transcribe this suffocating pain onto canvas, and I began to delve into painting as a vital necessity to talk about presence, memory, standing before the other, the enigma, the degradation... To immerse myself completely in seeking my roots and understanding of things, to feel an intimate land, something from the depths of the ages, is an attempt to land in this bridge of encounter through everything that links us to the world. It's the paradox of working in solitude to reach out to the Other. Art is first and foremost a living adventure; it's a way of looking at things that passes, or should pass, through the filters of ideology, a way of looking that is a place where thought can be touched. It's an experiment in the excavation of interiority through matter. It's a work without syntax, which takes on meaning and is communicated by passing a little of one's flesh into the flesh of the painting, until something detaches itself from the body and mind to become autonomous in this material, painting (or any other medium). To put it another way, it's an attempt to understand things in a way that the intellect cannot. Before being a means of expression, it is above all a lived, sensitive experience; just as with dance, music or any other art form, it is about embodiment. Emotions and feelings pass through pigments and gestures, just as they will vibrate differently on canvas or paper to the sound of a Stabat Mater or Cesária Évora. 3 La Petite, oil on canvas, 130 x 110 cm, 2024 → Time and memory seem to be recurring themes in some of your work. How do you approach the representation of these abstract concepts, and how do they intertwine? Do they interfere with your personal life? To tell the truth, I don't think about any concepts in my work. Between painting and myself, it's a sensory story inextricably linked to the intimate body, and therefore a story of life. It's one medium among others, but it shows us differently, just as each medium contains its own power and singularity, revealing a part of us that we can't see any other way. I think of the words of the artist Rémi Trotereau, whom I admire, who didn't want to talk too much about his work: "Do you ask an orchid to talk about botany? Some of your pieces seem to explore emptiness or absence, whether spatially or emotionally. Is this a deliberate theme? How do you arrive at these reflections and translate them into visual language? The themes follow one another without logic, they are not deliberate, they are the result of what surrounds me or crosses me, disturbs me or obsesses me. I'm not really trying to describe the space, but to incise it, and the more uncertainty there is, the more the space opens up. It's a field of exploration, a humus in constant metamorphosis that reveals itself in the accidental and the unexpected, experiences that lead to an intimate dialogue between the material, the canvas, the history of painting, the arts, the world and myself, and at the same time a dialogue between content and form. It's a place for touch, for looking, for the senses, a search for sensations that let the body's memory speak for itself in its everyday and millennial aspects. Argument | 11
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