PALIMPSESTE: Soloshow by Solène Ortoli

"What is the human brain, if not an immense and natural palimpsest? Countless layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen successively on your brain, as gently as light. It seemed that each one buried the previous one. But in reality none has perished."

Charles Baudelaire in Les Paradis artificiels

Solène Ortoli's painting oscillates between worlds that overlap in harmony, through their permeable borders.

The artist draws figurative but irrational spaces - plunging views whose perspectives contradict each other - in which human habitat mixes with a grassy and wooded nature.

The interior and exterior merge in a dialogue of shapes and colors: the wood of the frame of the houses - which seems to retain its plant growth - responds to that of the trees sometimes planed into cleats; the green of the grass is continued on a bed or a carpet. The greenery invites itself inside, and the outside is furnished, as the two spaces communicate thanks to large bay windows or the absence of walls, through which the characters' intimacy is exposed by the transparency of spaces.

These characters question their different natures. Some lay themselves bare and claim an original mythological human nature, that of the creationist Garden of Eden, while others return to the animal state, in a Darwinian simian form. Two conceptions of human evolution.
Others wander in ambiguity, like this mermaid frozen in an unfinished transition towards her desired humanity, forced to assume two natures superimposed on the canvas. Or these ghosts, half-erased human forms, floating between life and death, the world above and below communicating through baths similar to graves, sometimes connected by stairs.

In her creative process, Solène also hesitates between several possibilities, sometimes erasing one, while leaving her mark on the canvas, otherwise declining them in several canvases that are both analogous and distinct. Thus her work tells the artist's wanderings and piles up the layers of a whole humanity rich in its perpetual rewritings.

— Aurélien Simon