breaking, breathing, meeting: other space
Élisa Fantozzi creates fictions that play with what appears identical, and in particular with the “fixity where figures withdraw leaving an impression that is as fleeting as it is tenacious.”* Without a doubt, she attaches importance to these representations which are on the verge between reality and the imaginary, memory and what might come. The artist thus raises the question of what is the fundamental distinction between the natural and artificial.
The presence of the body - casts of the artist herself or of statues arranged on and around the floor elicit a series of encounters: emotional and physical…
Elisa Fantozzi creates and recreates possible worlds, gives life to narratives and prompts intrigues that are alternatives to reality.
Characters become things and things metamorphose into beings. She thus inspires images; images that give or impose themselves as those that make up our consciousness. Most of her work articulates itself around the potential midpoint between the body and space…
The stylistic construction that Elisa lends herself to reveals what takes place between these entities; it encourages us to look beyond the being and to question what we call “here”. Among the sentences that the artist has appropriated and which echoes her practice, she likes to quote this one: “What I mean by space is the relationship between the scale and scope in relation to concrete or abstract shapes”. It is necessary to remind ourselves here that what comes first is the form, what she, the artists, thinks, shapes and sculpts…
I’m reminded of the gift that Elisa’s cats left her; a pair of birds’ wings, a body part, both waste and trophies: there is no existence without shape. She plunges these open wings into resin. Gratitude is shown. But lightness gives way to gravity; movement to fixity, the aerial to terrestrial attraction.
The ordinary, which is without doubt one of the artist’s materials, is not a mere reproduction of recognizable and reassuring realities, it is a language that seeks in the human world what belongs to each one of us personally and which belongs to us all: existence itself
Extract from the text The world and the I, some possibles in Élisa Fantozzi’s work - de Sylvie
Lagnier, PhD - June, 2015
* Alain Brussine, «L’indéfigurable même», in le portrait contemporain - 1945-1992
MAMAC, Nice, p.36
Élisa Fantozzi develops, «models» and rubs its objects.
In the sculpture, but also the installation and the performance, the artist crosses eclectic forms by pursuing the same research: say the body in the space, physical or mental.
The installation AIRE precisely shows the body of a woman in bikini at scale 1, which floats on an inflatable swimming pool. This « elle flôttante « comes from the molding and from the cast in resin of a self-portrait of the artist, and knock by her hyperrealistic, smooth and pop side. Under her light appearances, she asks the question of our report in the time, in his stretching, and neglect of the body of the artist which offers itself to the viewer. More broadly, the work of Elisa Fantozzi evokes the classic problems of the sculptor: the gravity anybody body found in the Earth’s atmosphere, or otherwise raising taking us back to the weight of the body in outer space.
hybrid natural sculpture, egg leitmotiv recurs in the work as an object of experimentation. Body to become, between the shape and the formless, the hardness and the softness. For the artist, it becomes surface contact with the ground when it exposes a giant pair of tongs perched on eggs (perilously yours), or becomes « food » for thought on the industrialization of the life and the art, When he is produced by a 3D printer.
The humor, sometimes revealing of a graver reality, often characterizes the work, the example of the monumental sculpture entitled Renaissance: a giant seashell family cowries rises vertically, establishing a strong physical relationship with the viewer,
between domination and penetration possibility. The sensuality of the surfaces and the strangeness of the scale reveals another space, mental and sound when the installation lets escape from funny borborygmi.
More recent, the practice of the collage extends with average different, some issues already in the works: sculpture and architecture, décor and body, research on the mismatch or symbiosis.
Again, the space opens, landscape surrealist accents, dual reality and willingly facetious.
Elisa Fantozzi was born May 23, 1972 in Aix-en-Provence.
After traveling for seven years between New York and the south of France, she moved today in Sète
Personal Exhibitions
2015
- Journey, Antique Mediterranean Garden, Balaruc-les-Bains
2014
-Solid shapes and colors, Jardin du Jas de Bouffan, the association with Let’s see, Aix-en-Provence
- Circonvolutions, media library of the Grand Narbonne, with the Grand Narbonne Art School
- VOLUME, Chapel of the High district, Sète
2013
- There’s a joy, The chartreuse, the national center of the writings of the show, Villeneuve-Les-Avignon
- Is a Joy, Pierre de Luxembourg Museum and Saint-Pons Media library, Villeneuve-Les-Avignons 2011
- Hop Hop Hope, Gallery Lot 10, Brussels 2009
- AIRE, Esca Gallery 4 barbers, Nîmes 2008
- While waiting for Sunday, PPCM Gallery, Nimes 2007
- Envy to be alive, Chateau d’O du Parc, Montpellier 2006
- For sale, Gallery France Fiction, Paris
- Perilously yours, G.M Gallery, Montpellier
Group exhibitions
2013
- Where is Joy? curatorial project with the FRAC L-R in
- Drawing room, Aperto Gallery Square Sainte Anne Montpellier
- Commissioner for a tree, on a proposal for Mathieu Mercier, Crystal Palace, Bordeaux
- GAMERZ Festival, M2F creation, School of Fine Arts, Aix-en-Provencethehight School, Villeneuve-Les-Avignon
2012
- MULTIPLE, State Museum of Contemporary Art, MRAC, Sérignan
2011
- Resurgence, Meteorological Model, curated by Hervé Ic and Ferdinand Corte on an invitation from Jackie Ruth Meyer, Art Center LE LAIT, Albi - Participation in the exhibition of Annie Abrahams CRAC Languedoc-Roussillon, Sète
2010
- The source, Le Labo project, orchestrated by Ferdinand Corte on a proposal for Jackie Ruth Meyer, Art Center LE LAIT, Albi
- EGGOAL or the machine to make eggs, Regional Contemporary Art Centre Languedoc-Roussillon, CRAC Sète
2009
Public Gardens / Private Gardens, Aldebaran Association, Castries
2008
- Vamos a la playa, Various locations, Curator Stephanie Barbon, Fontenay-le-Comte
- Thawed Rabelais, Commissioner Emmanuel Latreille, an exhibition organized by the F.R.AC. Languedoc-Roussillon, La Villeneuve-lès Avignon Chartreuse, and the Pont du Gard
- Places of State; in what world we live? Commissioner friends of the Fabre museum, Carré Sainte Anne, Montpellier
2007
- Give a Monkey a Brain ..., curated by Antonin Luivert ETC Gallery, Montpellier
- Gaude Mihi, Pascal Vanhoecke Gallery, Paris
- Enter in a matter project room, B.A.N.K The gallery, Paris
2006
- Hapax, Aperto Gallery, Commissioner Anna Olszeswska, Montpellier
- Dreams are my Reality, the B.A.N.K gallery, Paris
- Contingencies garden, Domaine de Saint-Gervais-sur-Mare
Fairs/Exhibition of contemporary art
- Art Paris, Salon for Art Collector , the Grand Palais, March 2010
- Slick, Salon for Art Collectors at 104, Paris, 2008
- Art Basel, Salon for Art Collectors, Miami, 2008
- Art Paris, Salon for Art Collectors, at the Grand Palais, Paris 2007
- Slick, Salon for Art Collectors «Living for Art Collectors», Paris 20th, 2007
- FIAC, with the BANK Gallery, Cour Carrée du Louvre, Paris 2006