Born in 1967 in Pamiers, homeland of the composer Gabriel Fauré, Elia Pagliarino is a french visual artist, painter, draftswoman and sculptor. She lives and works in the Corbières. Descendant of Catalan and Italian ancestors, she shared her childhood with...
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Born in 1967 in Pamiers, homeland of the composer Gabriel Fauré,
Elia Pagliarino is a french visual artist, painter, draftswoman and sculptor.
She lives and works in the Corbières.
Descendant of Catalan and Italian ancestors, she shared her
childhood with the disabled residents of the establishment where her parents
worked. It is certainly in this environment, where the irrational easily
invites the imaginary, that she built her universe of dreamlike realism, her
reflections on surface appearances, the notions of norm and identity.
Elia Pagliarino will first study fine arts and applied arts to
practice her first profession, graphic designer and scenographer. Then, in
2014, she dedicated herself exclusively to her artistic activity.
Guided by the need to study the appearances and our share of
animality, she will first create large drawings of hybrid beings, the Wild
Tales. These first creations will be the source of a substantive work that will
reveal her passion for ethnographic, historical and naturalistic research.
She will imagine a whole utopian world where endangered species open
the way to "Species in Process of Appearance", derived from poetic crossings,
fanciful mutations, or anthropomorphic dreams. A world according to Eugène
Ionesco: "The truth is in the imagination." Geographical sites,
etymologies and definitions are based on the artist’s researches. A real
cabinet of curiosities from natural history museum installed in glass boxes.
In 2016, Elia Pagliarino’s extensive research revealed to her
all the richness and variety of cultures carried by individual human
adventures. She is convinced that her work can transmit what she discovers.
She will then imagine the "Beacons", both supports and containers of
chronicles of lives around the world. On these enamelled terracotta sculptures,
the artist interprets the story in painting, then places inside the written record
on a roll of paper.
A kind of "story-tellers", these Beacons (nearly 250 currently)
constitute a collective and popular memory. They won the 1st Pure Art Prize at
Battle, in England.
An approach that Elia Pagliarino still pursues today, presented
in numerous individual and collective exhibitions, in parallel to her paintings,
with the recurring preoccupation of the artist, Man facing Nature. She
expresses this duality in an always fragile balance, where sometimes the human
dominates his environment, and sometimes Nature takes back its rights.
