Azart

All this is said in the tone of everyday conversation. Outside, the sounds of the Mac 2007 trade show drift in. With Aude, you're quickly transported elsewhere. During her studies, she worked to become completely independent. Whenever the opportunity arose, she didn't hesitate; she packed her bags, backpack in tow, and set off on an adventure. India, Pakistan. She feared nothing. With her nose to the wind, she traveled, fell in love in Mexico, left again, crisscrossing the globe. Still absorbing images, sounds, violence, breathtaking colors, love, mind-blowing rituals, and a killer tequila. Life lived to the fullest. "I even followed Commander Marcos's caravan. It's made up of fabulous people. They're trying to save ideals. You don't find idealists like that anymore." Words are no longer enough to describe all these experiences, all these encounters. It's felt but not explained. Inevitably, we'll find it all in the artist's paintings.

"We're in the 21st century, it's exciting, we have to go for it!"

"What I'm presenting here, at Mac 2007, stemmed entirely from a kind of animal instinct.

I had a powerful urge to start with a blank canvas, without asking myself any questions, without knowing where I was going. Above all, not to think beforehand, but to work until exhaustion." Aude intensifies her statement. She's only been fully dedicated to painting for a year, but she'd felt this visceral need rising within her for a long time. What power! "It's the moment when I have to draw, when I have to paint, when I have to strike the stone." "It has to come out." She has stored up so much energy. She finds herself completely in this status of artist, which corresponds exactly to her fierce need for independence, and also for solitude.

She loves these long moments of solitude. "My generation is confronted with so many things, which we absorb as we go.

That's where concepts are born. What differentiates the painter from other artists is that they can hide behind their work. We don't want to be on the front line, unlike a singer or an actor. That suits me perfectly." This new generation of painters no longer has any hang-ups about the potential place of painting in relation to other means of expression in Contemporary Art. It's a rearguard battle that doesn't concern them at all. It's a joy to listen to them. "It's an extraordinary society. It's happening now. We can try everything; explore everything, experiment with everything. It's fantastic." Anyway, we're right in the middle of it, there's no going back, is there? Let's use what we have to move forward, to have a blast: It's up to us to create, it's up to us to take initiative. Nobody's going to do it for us. I want to say to this generation - Make this society work for you, get moving, we're fed up with handouts and preferential treatment! "We're in the 21st century, it's exciting, we have to go for it!"

Aude fears nothing, except perhaps humanity. We can falter so quickly... We don't know if her characters are good or bad. They are often prostrate in eloquent silence. The paradox of their situations unsettles the eye. This isn't reassuring painting; it carries within it many of the anxieties of our time. Far from the beaten path, her canvases provoke many frowns. Perplexity grips the viewer. This is not the least of the charms of this subtle work, where the style is simultaneously fragile and mysterious. Aude Ambroggi has character, that's for sure.

The kind that Suarès describes as "the passion to be oneself, at all costs." Here is a young artist who should dazzle us in the coming years. You've been warned!Aude Ambroggi

The old world is behind her…

Françoise Monnin showed us some images by a magnificent young artist. We were immediately captivated by her paintings. Her palette of African tones, her ambiguous figures, her complex stories… That was all it took for us to rush to see them.

By Gérard Gamand

Ideas travel faster than words. Aude is the passionate type, a lover of life. Gluttonous, even. She just turned thirty, but has already lived five times as long as most normal people. She charges ahead, stubborn, enthusiastic. She shakes things up, she confronts, she stands her ground—in short, she sparkles with all the intelligence of our time. And with all its doubts and anxieties too. This new century, with its procession of paradoxes and opportunities, fascinates her. She has unsuspected appetites for tomorrow. We're in a small room above the Salon Mac 2007. Our meeting couldn't have been arranged any other way. Sitting cross-legged on the improbable carpet, Aude, a beautiful young brunette with intense brown eyes, wearing jeans and a black sweater, radiates both happiness and doubt.

This is her first exhibition in France. Yet collectors' eyes are already fixed on her work, and we featured her painting in Azart's special issue dedicated to the 2008 generation, entitled "Conceptual Figuration." It must be said that she challenges some preconceived notions. Aude is profound, wild, untamed, a blend of quiet anxieties and childlike wonder. An explosive cocktail, made of freshness and cruelty. A rare moment of happiness when the painting is good, in a kind of apotheosis of all lucidity. A Figuration of the century, in her image, one might say. “I wanted to explore, through drawing, the images that were flashing through my mind,” she explains. She searches for her words in French with delight, having just arrived from London and feeling much more at ease in English.

But also much more at ease with the Anglo-Saxon mentality. How could one not understand her, given that this encounter is taking place amidst the “absurd” transport strikes, a veritable Franco-French caricature that has the whole world in stitches?

An inner turmoil

Her journey is obviously atypical and incredibly romantic. It begins in Africa, in Kenya to be precise. The Great Lakes region.

One naturally thinks of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, which so powerfully illustrates, in its Adagio, the magnificent landscapes of this timeless Africa. A Corsican father, an English mother. A wild, solitary, almost closed-off childhood. Aude silently absorbs everything, in an inner turmoil. “What’s amazing about Africa is that everything is unstructured. Everything you no longer find in our so-called developed societies.

On a human level, there’s no hiding…” She is building herself up from the ground up. She will stay in Africa for eight years, then in Greece, then in England, where she will pursue her studies. The youngest child, she will dare to confront her father when it comes to asserting her choice to be an artist. “It’s not a real job… you’ll starve,” etc. A timeless refrain, if ever there was one. Doors slam, tempers flare. Shock and dismay in the family. She decides to study… criminology, for four years. “Since my father told me I was going to starve, I decided to go after what kills! It’s a bit violent…” she says, smiling in retrospect. "It's the observation of the human soul that has fascinated me: trying to understand deviance. Observing why we deviate. We quickly realize that there are not only psychological factors, there are also social, environmental factors, etc. It's the dark side that is always very interesting. How can we cross the line... I might not have drawn what I drew if I hadn't gone through that. I've never been afraid to delve into disturbing things. On the contrary."