Zoé Brunet-Jailly
Zoé Brunet-Jailly is a French artist born in 1991, who now lives and works in Paris. She uses oil paint and computer-generated imagery, usually in the manner of a portrait painter, to capture the complexity of memory and algorithmic creation. Her works are also coloured by the different moods found on the internet, between popular culture and ancient myths. Her avatar, Ellie Hedden (who appeared in 2014), enables her to create her ‘Hyperdreams’, reconstructed worlds populated by invented faces. Her work has been exhibited at the Refraction Festival, Miami Art Week and Jeune Création 69.
R.P.G. series
These three paintings are part of a series called R.P.G., an acronym used to designate a role-playing game in which you embody a character who can evolve over the course of a quest. Here, in these paintings, we take on a variation of Mathilde, a friend turned character, exploring a world populated by current myths and conspiracies. It just so happens that her first name means ‘strength in battle’.
Two other paintings: Les lois de Roy & SP95
In all my paintings I build up the characters by superimposition, in a way that’s quite similar to what I usually do when I make faces on the computer. For Ellie Hedden, I start with a face that tends to resemble me in certain ways, which I accentuate. Then I sculpt, I transform, to reach the moment when I perceive something of myself. It’s not a real self-portrait, but an incarnation, an essence. And that’s why nothing is really fixed, why some areas are more worked than others, because it’s not a realistic portrait, what I’m looking for is to reach the moment when it appears, and it’s always in a certain state of flux, when the image is still moving and not totally fixed.
