Ellen AkimotoSpinning in the Afterimage

For her solo exhibition at Laetitia Gorsy - She BAM!, Ellen Akimoto engages in an unadulterated and direct dialogue with the space by installing a large-format wallpaper with organic but enigmatic patterns whose colours gradually reverse from one side of the gallery to the other. Through this optical effect, the artist triggers a hypnotising and disruptive movement that creates a rift through space and time. Lost in the cosmic expanse, the gaze searches for something tangible, the familiar, and encounters familiar surroundings and everyday objects depicted in the surrounding paintings.

On closer inspection, the scenes and objects appear restless and distorted. The bodies are as if frozen, frozen in time, waiting in strange and unsightly poses for a future dissolution. These stagings seem to be taken directly from those moments in Hitchcock films in which the protagonist begins to understand the terrible situation in which she finds herself. The still images leave our consciousness in a suspicious expectation of a before or after, without offering a straightforward narrative. The key to the puzzle lies in the details.

Ellen Akimoto's works are characterised by structured combinations of shapes and a wide range of colours, which form the basis of her creative process. The artist usually begins her compositions with a digital collage of images she has found on the internet and photos of her own body. While the initial compilation is done on the computer, the final assembly takes place on the canvas, with the paint giving her what she needs in terms of materiality and colourfulness to build even more complex narratives. She uses different techniques - from oil to acrylic - which allow her to play with light and create confusing perspectives and depths on the canvas. In this series of paintings, the architectural elements - walls, windows, floors - are recognisable in the background, but appear strange and fragmented, raising doubts about their origin and existence. In contrast, the surrounding objects - furniture, tablecloths, tapestries, fishbowls, plants - and the figures in the foreground are painted in great detail and precision.

Ellen Akimoto juxtaposes naturalistic tones with surrealistic colours that allow her to convey messages and feelings. The bodies reveal themselves in a juxtaposition of unnatural and saturated colours. They appear to have been painted according to a thermal spectrum ranging from deep black and murky grey-blue to smoky reds, including pinks and greenish pastels. The hands and feet are painted in bright blue and intense red, emphasising the importance of the transformation and development of the characters. The large canvases show aspects of human existence, figures on the verge of nausea, sometimes even on the verge of death: a lonely woman sitting between shadows and unnatural brightness, an excor- porating sublimation of death in which identity is erased, a sudden encounter with oneself... Even the plants have dried up and a goldfish swims with its ghostly doppelganger. In this exhibition, Ellen Akimoto shows another side to her work, imbued with an obscure and mystical aura that recognises the indescribable and the invisible, oscillating between the familiar and the fantastic, the personal and the universal, life and death.