ELISE PEROI
Born in Nantes, France in 1990, Elise Peroi lives and works in Brussels. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels with a Masters in Textile Design in 2015.
Since her thesis “Weaving the Landscape”, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, Elise Peroi has been inspired by nature in all its forms. Her installation structures are both paintings and weavings, or even perhaps sculptures...
Somewhat like nature on the move, a standing garden, dreamed or fantasized, a sensitive and volatile echo of the heterotopias of Michel Foucault and the Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino.
Whether it being in her architectural installations in which load-bearing constructions rise, or more recently through her garden plans placed on the ground like carpets concurrently decomposed and recomposed of textile pieces and natural materials, Elise Peroi continues to explore the art of weaving. A body of work, or should we say a way of seeing, that summons the full and the empty always in close relation with the elements that surround us; the vegetal of course, the mineral, the shadow and the light to the air that we breathe. "At the same time, I am looking for a way to translate the breath of the landscape and the landscape as an inhabited place" she said. Inspired by the books Vivre de Paysage ou L’impensé de la Raison by François Jullien, Elise Peroi seeks to translate a global vision of the world, where everything around us “is no longer a matter of ‘seeing’, but of living”.
In her work, everything begins with painting an imagination linked to the living that she comes to draw on the surface of the silk, a fantastic world populated by plants and strange animals which already seem to be in motion. The canvas will then be lacerated to be inserted, fragment after fragment, to constitute an unusual chain that Elise Peroi likes to double on her loom, as she says to create depth and let the air pass. This notable breath transcends her work once the weaves are hung or stretched on the wooden structures, like nature in motion, a suspended landscape floating beyond the horizon of our eyes. There is undoubtedly a little artifice, visual magic, a certain echo of the art of Japanese Tokonoma, a window of the mind that pierce the wall to transport us to an ideal exterior as it is perfectly mentalized.
Landscape painter, weaver of Nature, sculptor of the living... whatever denomination would suit best to define the unusual artist that is Elise Peroi, the work is revealed in a dimension that transcends our own reality to immerse us in an almost gaseous state, a world with softer contours.
