Sophie Garapon

Sophie Garapon lives in Bordeaux, and has been trained in painting and nude workshops for about thirty years. At first, it was a question of transcribing an impression of landscape approaching the figuration, on the motif, in nature, tasting silence, light and colours, with pastels, but already it was floating like a small note of strangeness or mystery. The enchantment, the dream, has crept into his painting and figures have invited themselves, perhaps it is an emergence of questions about the loneliness of man, his finitude, and jumbled, his entanglement in nature, the anguish of the meaning of life... In a veranda workshop open to the sky and light, the works emerge, located between reality and imagination on canvas, wooden and paper panels, oil painting and mixed techniques. We can retain a certain influence of symbolism, including Odilon REDON, a painter of Bordeaux origin. Since 2010, his works have been regularly exhibited in the offices of town halls and shops. She was awarded the Grand Prix de la ville d’Eysines (Gironde) in 2012 and the Prix de la municipalité de Coutras (Gironde) in 2015, which acquired one of her paintings entitled Rust and Water. Artistic philosophy: This painting tries to treat from a flat surface an opening towards other temporal and spatial dimensions where nature mixes with the human. As in mythology, which tells fabulous stories between characters and nature. Imagination blends with reality. This work evokes the future of man and the transmutation of man into nature in the natural cycle of life and death, which leads to questions about the meaning of life, fundamental questions about existence and the possible transcendence of thought and the state of being. This work can be approached as an opening on the position of a human being in an environment of consumerism, which leaves aside a spiritual elevation of man. Press and criticism: Emmanuel BALLANGE 2016 " Sophie Garapon paints enigmas: in the middle of puddles a head emerges, she looks at us, as surprised as we are by this strange trade. No anecdotal meaning imposed, the essential is not there. Sophie Garapon is trying to put our tongues in the mud. For this purpose she herself forged her tools; no one could say precisely how these paintings are made. Where does the content come from? Is it the content or the form? Is this plan close or far away? Sometimes we border on abstraction. Well aware of the infinite complexity of beings and things, Sophie Garapon is careful not to guide us in a possible decoding of her works. It leaves us, in a salvific question, as if suspended... "Patrick MARECHAL the Republican 2017" Sophie GARAPON’s paintings are a mixture of abstract with soft shades inspired by the serenity of nature, with reminders of human life in the form of diaphanous silhouettes, present but a little unreal like nymphs or ghosts. And it is this mixture of mythological characters and nature that makes his paintings difficult to classify because they are between real and imaginary. »