By Gaelle S. Warner
I am an Autodidact. (Editor’s note: An Autodidact is a person who learns about a subject with little or no formal education. Gaelle Werner is a self-taught artist). I have been painting and taking photos for more than 20 years now.
Three cities have shaped my artistic influences – New York, Los Angeles and Paris.
Gaelle S. Warner “New York City” Collage on Canvas
I lived for two years in New York. There, I discovered an incredible creative permissiveness, a structured chaos and a history that was in perpetual reinvention.
A couple years later, I moved to Los Angeles. I found light and a scripted version of reality. I stayed 8 years. I painted characters draped in bright colors that recalled “naïve” painters.
I had my first exhibition in Los Angeles before going back to France.
In 2002 I moved to Paris. The grey buildings and somber tones made me give up painting for a while to take up photography. I walked up and down the streets looking for clues, collecting details in order to reclaim these territories as mine.
For the past three years, I have worked on a series of paintings entitled “Découpages Urbains”. It is a break in my style. I wanted to create an esthetic that would allow me to explore visually my reflection on our environment. As I found out that from one city to another, from one architecture to the other, the traces of the urban landscapes surround, label and smother us. On my trips, I have tried to capture the details in each city (Berlin, Seville, Rome, Tozeur, Rio…) that are, for me, defining: walls with peeling paint, geometric lines shooting through the sky, the multi ethnic heritages and the life I imagine behind those closed blinds.
Gaelle S. Warner “Number 4 in Berlin” Collage on Canvas
In these paintings, the repeating of the same sized shapes of the image offers a distorting mirror of our urban accumulation. The pulverization of the photos imposes a fragmented rhythm, sometime binary. It creates a puzzle in which the hyper city crumbles, multiplies and finally comes together.
Gaelle S. Warner
“Librairie Tabac Journaux” Collage on Canvas
To see more of Gaelle’s Urban Photography visit Gaelle S. Warner.
