Frédérique Tristant is a French artist born in Vannes in 1971, who lives and works in Brittany in the Morbihan.She is both a specialist in semiotics, holding a doctorate from the University of Bordeaux, and a painter whose training was validated by a CAPES.

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This double training irrigates her work, offering beyond its graphic aspect, a reflection on the nature of the representation resulting from her university course on the image of the bodies through the tools of reproductions (photographs, videos) and scientific investigation (radiology, scanner, MRI etc).

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From this reflection, she seeks the limit, the tension between the physical reality of skins and bodies and the dreamlike vision that representation offers: subtle recreation of this reality in a two-dimensional space materialized by some pictorial layers thinner than the epidermis.

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Her work revisits the female portrait from the angle of a carnal envelope that brings memories to the surface of the skin.As in her research on the first photographic atlas of dermatology by Dr. Hardy and Montmeja in 1868, she retouches each portrait with watercolor and acrylic paint. She takes over a physiognomy that she remodels and remakes as she wishes. She refines these masks that tell women's stories like the diary of our melancholy, our absences and our sensuality.

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The wrinkles and folds of the skin paper anchor her work in the genre of the Vanities operating a clear shift from the photographic witness to the pictorial. The motifs (flowers, birds, stripes, toile de Jouy, liberty, gingham, etc.) allow him to pass from a real person photographed to a fictional character and to refuse the simple decorative aspect. The motif is a Proust's madeleine that makes his work nostalgic and his personal memories become universal.
 

Art Gallery, ARS ESSENTIA, Beaune, Bourgogne, France.