Elsa Coustou

P.T. These pointy-headed figures are at the core of my research. I construct a myth, a narrative around these characters, almost like a film. In fact, I thought of the exhibition as a film set in which they are the main characters. The first act highlights relationship structures that are anything but serene: I want to show tragic and dramatic moments of life that are full of passion. This manifests itself in romantic drama as well as in the sexual and animal drive inherent in every individual. My painting depicts the violence, but also the fragility of being. The second act of the exhibition is intended to be a moment of flowering, of blossoming and of expression of bodies’ vital energy. It is a question of invoking, on the one hand, an immaterial and spiritual dimension, one which approaches the divine, and of summoning worlds linked to the aesthetics of hell. These two dimensions can be found in many of my paintings.

E.C. Your works often show the ambiguity of a situation, a tension between the violence of relationships and the source of pleasure they represent. Several of them deal with the erotic dimension of bodies and, at the same time, hint at a threat.

P.T. The exhibition is about the ambiguous relationship to the other. I am interested in the boundary between what is told and what is suggested. I draw on several references, including classical painting, which is designed to say a lot, to educate, to recount through historical scenes for example. There is also a lot of abstraction in my work, which requires the audience to make an effort to interpret it. There are also sadomasochistic aesthetic influences: the painted faces look like leather masks. In my paintings, certain elements can be recognised, but a kind of blur, of incomprehension always remains. There is a form of violence, scenes of attraction and repulsion, which seduce but also suggest danger. The Belly fountain, for example, evokes something light with its pure lines, but also something threatening, dangerous, heavy in the choice of materials. It is this impact and visual contrast that I look for in my work.

E.C. We find this notion of predation in the evocation of the zoo, which the title of the exhibition refers to, which is a space that is uncomfortable.

P.T. In the exhibition, the visitor is practically facing animals in a cage. They are both the beast that will be devoured and the one that will devour its prey. The exhibition is designed as a kind of hunting ground, a space of life where animals and insects interact with each other. The more I look at Fork Melody, the more I think that this work could represent the prey of a spider caught in its web. The Ô... Trees sculptures remind me of glowing fireflies; the Belly fountain could be the spider; the Soul Trains are crawling insects. And the ratio of scale and inversion makes them grotesque.

E.C. This is the first time you have created sculptures. They populate the entire exhibition and could be considered as a set of voices, sometimes alone, sometimes forming a choir when they are multiplied, in keeping with the idea of an exhibition-opera.

P.T. I have wanted to make sculptures for a long time. At the very outset of my practice, I started with ceramics, but on a small scale and I lacked the technical means. Sculpture has always been in my head, but it was impossible to achieve, and it was reflected in my paintings. For the exhibition, it was a real process of maturation which took time and allowed me to arrive at these forms, somewhere between the object and the animal or human body. I am fascinated by the object: an object in space has a force, it influences our movement, our body, our gaze. It dialogues with us. In my latest paintings, there are also these objects that influence or constrain bodies. I have tried to make the sculptures visually audible. I thought of the exhibition as a zoo of sculptures. The idea of an opera allows me to structure them, and by grouping them together, I give them a voice, a personality. The idea is to make an object speak. What would an object say? What is the sound of a suffering body? Fork Melody evokes the sound of screeching forks, but also the sound of nails being struck.

E.C. Many of your paintings remind me of the feeling of the uncanny, which Sigmund Freud described as a dread that arises from familiar things.

P.T. Yes, I try to go towards the disturbing, towards what one senses as a threat. I paint at night, that’s when I feel best—I find myself in a very particular atmosphere where I have the impression that things come alive. During the day, I scratch the paintings, I remove the layers of mistakes from the day before. It’s exhausting, but in the end, things appear in the works of their own accord. In psychoanalysis, there is this idea that by looking at an object, one enters into a dialogue with it; I don’t only look at the object, the object also looks at me. I find it fascinating to make something exist through the gaze, to enter into communication with it. I think that in voodoo, for example, this communication between the elements is very important, and so what seems inert is not quite, because it influences us. The uncanny speaks to me a lot. The first act of the exhibition is one of strangeness, of uneasiness around the private sphere; whereas the second act is rather a moment of rebirth.

E.C. The exhibition indeed evokes moments of transition, “childish” states where fears are not mastered, or are misunderstood, and other more “adult” states, with other ways of reading and understanding the world. You mention voodoo, but I am also thinking of the many references to mythology, especially Greco-Roman mythology, to biblical stories, to tales illustrating the great phases of life that are evoked in the exhibition. What role do myths play in your work?

P.T. I have always carried mythology, Christianity, voodoo, and their images with me. I went to church with my grandmother. The stories I was told as a child, or what I saw on television, such as Don Chaffey’s film Jason and the Argonauts (1963), which I watched dozens of times, or René Laloux’s La Planète sauvage (1973), have greatly influenced my painting, as have art history and cinema. Myth can also be understood in a contemporary sense: everyone creates myths around themselves today, like the Kardashians for example. I think that aura can create icons, even in the sense of religious icons.

E.C. Can you tell us about your approach to painting and your new paintings, which are more landscape-oriented and outward-facing than those in OPERA I and OPERA II, your two previous exhibitions?

P.T. I start working on a black canvas. What I find in black, alongside the idea of chaos, is the realm of possibility. It is a fertile void. I first make abstract forms with an airbrush. It’s a phase of stumbling, of trial and error, and I use a lot of different colours. Then I spray another colour to wash the airbrush and I add light and colours forming small spots like a kind of starry sky. Afterwards, the colour removes or erases the mistakes. Colour becomes a new field of creation in which I set up a landscape, a setting. Then the bodies take shape. These fields of abstraction become a landscape because the bodies, these figurative forms, come to settle within them. In the end, what makes the connection between abstraction and figuration is the body. That’s what gives them gravity. In my new paintings, I wanted to change the figures and characters that I usually paint. After seeing the same characters coming back and starting to form a kind of pantheon, I wanted to gradually erase them. In my most recent paintings, the body has slowly faded, the window narrows, the character recedes into the background. There are more encounters with colours that create tension through their bad taste, through what they indicate. I would never have imagined that I would move towards work that would come so close to abstraction, or at least not so quickly. I realise that the fact that I have worked a lot on hands, faces, expressions, the cry, which are strong images, makes me want to move towards something different. This is a moment of transformation for my work.