For painter Céline Lyaudet, ideas and objects hold a basilisk-like power: gaze too long, and the viewer becomes petrified.
The French artist is speaking in particular to the title of her piece Meduse Médusée, which appears in her debut solo exhibition Map to the Path, ending this weekend at Anno Domini. Referring to the snake-haired woman of Greek mythology whose stare turns others to stone, the painting features a woman with animal-like limbs beneath a giant eye. The woman is almost a centaur, though not quite. While the subject is far from a literal depiction of Medusa, the spirit of the myth is present in the painting in what Lyaudet calls “gesture,” or the sense of movement living in a painting.
“For me, the gesture of painting—it’s like magic. I’m thinking of prehistoric cave painting, for example. When you draw a horse, you’re bringing the spirit of the horse to you,” Lyaudet says. The painter cites the late Hilma af Klint as one of her influences, a pioneer of abstract art known for channeling her spiritual beliefs into mystical, geometric works.
Lyaudet began painting two years ago in her hometown of Nantes, with a background as a theater set designer contributing a diverse array of creative fuel. Crossing paths with many musicians in her line of work led the artist to further explore the close relationship she’d always felt between color and sound. Eventually, she learned the involuntary sensory connection that informed this relationship had a name: synesthesia.
“I had felt like that since I was a child, but I didn’t have a word for it until I started painting on music. When I spoke with friends who were musicians they totally understood, because so many were composing in colors. [For me], it’s this very special state like meditation…I am in the color, I am in the music.”
At times, the sounds evoked by certain colors and visuals can be overwhelming, but Lyaudet credits her experience with synesthesia as a force for the intuitive nature of her creative process. Along with the eclectic, psychedelic-tinged playlist she curated to accompany Map to the Path, Lyaudet’s sunset palette and lyrically titled pieces weave their own dream world.
Lyaudet names some recurring characters of her realm: “tree-woman,” “animalistic little demon-spirits.” Wolves, often associated with danger and witchcraft in European folklore, emerge in various forms. In “Moon and the Werewolf,” the moon is an ectoplasmic feminine figure with white tendrils stretching from her body around the slender wolf-man, encircling him with light.
The strange, numinous creatures evoke the mythology-inspired archetypes of early psychoanalyst Carl Jung, particularly the concept of “anima/animus”: the shadow of feminine and masculine energy harbored in each person.
Lyaudet’s spirit- and animal-women came to her toward the beginning of her painting career, which she characterizes as a difficult time of searching for inner unity and rediscovering her sense of female identity. Bringing the figures to life on canvas allowed her to express not only the many different sides of femininity, but also “the animal inside, the male part, vegetal and spiritual, and to find the balance between all those sides.”
Many of these earlier works are small in size, and so Lyaudet painted a wall of the gallery dark blue for grounding and contrast against the pieces’ white space. A branch or sea-vegetable-like outline of pale dashes connects each painting, uniting them like a sort of family tree.
“The hanging [of paintings] is like a living organism,” she says, furthering the sense of cross-sensory connection in the pieces. “I wanted something really organic.”
Anchoring the show is a bright, fiery-colored mural, the painter’s first work of this scale. She made no sketches for the piece, wanting spontaneity to capture “the spirit of the exhibition.” In the center of the painting, Lyaudet incorporated her own handprint, flanked by a spirit flexing graceful fingers to the left and another wolf figure looming on the right.
“It was sort of my way to say ‘that’s me,’ not a literal self-portrait but to allow myself to put me on this wall, to not hide behind my work anymore. An affirmation of myself and my artistic identity.”
Map to the Path
Thu-Sat, 12pm, Free
Anno Domini, San Jose
