Artension

Aude Ambroggi

Enchanting Stillness

"Painters have already done everything. Only the interpretations, the narratives, are different. I don't feel new at all, not in the slightest!"

By Françoise Monin

The days of avant-gardes concerned with wiping the slate clean are long gone: today's young generation claims a long memory, an inscription in history. Devouring museum collections, reproductions of masterpieces in libraries and online, Ambroggi loves art history. She particularly admires the frescoes of Fra Angelico, the paintings of Beckmann, the photographs of Diane Arbus—everything that speaks of the world with lucidity yet tenderness.

Strong-willed

Ambroggi isn't arrogant, but she is strong-willed. For her, painting is first and foremost a way to remain independent. "This profession offers so much freedom. No office. No orders. It's very simple." Every morning, in the studio, when she Grasping her sticks of charcoal and dry pastel, the young woman experiences a pleasure comparable to that which she felt, even at seventeen, when she roamed improbable lands, in the company of only a friend. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka…

Two years later, she was living in Mexico with an artist and in contact with intellectuals dreaming of a popular and fraternal Latin America. Back in Europe, she wanted to go to art school. Her family temporarily dissuaded her. She studied criminology, taking the opportunity to draw and draw some more, anxious, suspicious faces. Faces that were unspeakable, secretive.

Four years later, she finally entered art school in London, and it was sculpture above all that attracted her. From stones with strange reflections, using direct carving, she brought forth long faces with very round eyes, wise yet lively.

Sublime Intimacy

Since settling in Paris, Ambroggi has been drawing, in color and on a very large scale. Inspired by Romanesque sculptures or Symbolist paintings, scientific plates devoted to animals or plants, or even family photo albums, the figures emerge with a disturbing stillness. Metamorphosed and intertwined, like memories in dreams, like motifs in rebuses, they captivate and intrigue. Between the figures depicted, there are definitive silences but intense relationships: the bodies are tender, the gazes opaque, the attitudes frozen, the setting weightless.

The complexity of emotional bonds, the power of memory, the power of dreams, the reality of solitude, the melancholy of innocence—all that constitutes intimacy is sublimated here. Clear lines, matte surfaces, a subtle palette—the whole, at once limpid and soft, celebrates the obvious. of mystery. Everything, simultaneously, caresses and pierces us.