Inès Longevial, Chaotic Energy : Christie's Paris, 9, avenue Matignon - 75008 Paris

After an entire year marked by restrictions, Inès Longevial has created a series of self-portraits depicting a stylised and constrained state of waiting, in which colour occupies time and fills a latent solitude.

Born in 1990 in Agen, Inès Longevial works with drawing and painting in resonance with impressions, feelings, and sensations from which she naturally derives her palette. The artist approaches her memories through colour and gives form to candid, absorbed faces that carry the nostalgia of seasons, sunsets, nuances of light, and caresses.

Inès Longevial initially devoted herself to drawing, practising it like a diary, with a freedom and spontaneity of gesture that brushes against the world of early childhood. This daily exercise sets the tone for her subsequent approach to painting. The new Domino series brings the two media together more clearly than ever before, with painting naturally emerging from drawing. While, in the artist’s work, faces often become the site of fanciful ornamentation, rooted in a patchwork of vivid colours, this new series tends towards greater restraint and focuses above all on chromatic variations.

Inès Longevial conceives these more concise works as the fruits of a period of deprivation in which it is no longer possible for an artist to draw nourishment from encounters, travel, or discoveries, and where a sleepy, flavourless routine imposes itself like a threatening shadow. Her overflowing imagination thus gives way to a more concentrated, somewhat analytical and almost serial exploration of a bodily posture that has all the qualities of a contemporary allegory: artificial, uncomfortable yet seductive, barely contained by the canvas, it conveys idleness, the discomfort of confined spaces, and the unease of social expectations to present oneself in the best possible light. The silent attitude of this woman, depicted across several colour ranges and caught in an intricate arrangement of arms, echoes Picasso’s The Absinthe Drinker, absent from herself and withdrawn into her thoughts. It becomes clear where this attraction to the complexity of a pose comes from: it is also an exercise in style, a form of eccentricity in which certain affinities with fashion photography emerge. In another register, the artist also acknowledges the influence of several portraits by Paula Modersohn-Becker, imbued with a rural simplicity in which the resting hands occupy a crucial place.

For Inès Longevial, who recognises in Matisse a sensory intensity at the origin of her own artistic vocation, colour is a prism through which to apprehend the world and, in her paintings, always becomes the expression of an internalised moment. Each flavour, each atmosphere imposes itself upon her through its own chromatic spectrum, to which drawing submits. Yet in a period little conducive to emotional intensity, the artist acknowledges that her recent exploration of colour has become more random and experimental. Thus, this body of work constitutes a variation on the often reductive polarities we call “warm colours” and “cool colours”, which are either intermingled within the figure and background or radically separated in the paintings of the Domino series. The works in this series therefore sometimes operate in pairs, as mirrors, based on a subtle inversion of tones, evoking negatives or a particular process of colour in the field of analogue photography. Nevertheless, the means employed are those of a true colourist: the artist applies a first layer of a highly vivid hue to the surface of the canvas, which seeps through in places, underpinning soft greens, delicate pinks, luminous mauves, and spring yellows, as though drawn from the palette of Pierre Bonnard. This initial colour permeates every tone, disrupting their classification according to the scheme of “warm and cool colours” and thus discreetly determining the atmosphere of the painting. Brighter reds or sunlit oranges awaken these compositions, which allow considerable latitude to the shadows, themselves always coloured. These works gradually move towards more corrosive tones, culminating in Peach Skin: this painting moves further away from any claim to naturalism, with a pop palette extending to fluorescent orange, signalling an inner fire whose manifestation is unprecedented.

Marked by her reading of Virginia Woolf’s diary, Inès Longevial recognises in the relationship between writing and melancholy a reflection of her own intimacy with painting. And faced with this series of self-portraits painted during the pandemic, one might be tempted to invoke the words of Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I discovered within me an invincible summer.”

E. Keyl