Elisabeth Llach

Born in 1970 in Neuchatel (Switzerland), she lives in Les Clées (Switzerland).

Ever since Lewis Carroll, we know the extent to which there is a place for perversity in Wonderland title of a series of drawings by Elisabeth Llach. And in fact it is essentially by way of drawing that this Swiss artist, who graduated in 1995 from the ECAL, Lausanne's art school, is developing a whole world of characters, and female figures in particular, “worked” right down to their apparent forms, through their fantasies, desires and deviances.

What does the dictum “Wherever I am going, I am already there” do for you?

Yes, indeed. Is that a pessimistic question, or a wise one? But what I do know is that “wherever I am, I'm already going there.”

A word about your project or artistic proposal?

I'm working on some series of paintings and drawings. In this way I can work on what's missing or incomplete in the single image. The general titles of my series convey this desire to veer, like a collector, towards ensembles which are illuminated and become specific: Woman Reclining, In Wonderland, Fantasies, Hysterics, A Nice Abuse... For Le Printemps de septembre I'll be showing part of my collection Don't Worry. It's a set of small paintings on paper.

What does art enable you to do?

I like casting an eye over the different facets of this world: joy, drift, deviance, attachment, cruelty, effort, levity, futility etc. I theatricalize, I exaggerate features, I unstick the parts of reality to extract more truth from them. The entire set of feelings and their contradictions which define our contemporary world interests me. What is complicated is not being able to sidestep either art history in general or the history of painting in particular, wanting to put something down in the continuity of this history, something of our day and age, or our contemporary world. Painting and drawing offer me a way of looking for precision.