EMMA GODEBSKA
From accumulation to simplicity
Emma Godebska lives and works in Nimes, south of France, since 2012.
Born into an artistic family, Emma Godebska studied Applied Arts in London. Her training led her to work on materials, textures and colours, and to build a reflection around the notions of Imprint and Trace.
In recent years, she has been exploring a path where the quest for the essence of painting passes through a search for a purified gesture and a minimal pictorial language. There is a need to go to the essential and to centre herself on the Here and Now, to capture a light, a feeling, a moment.
She works on white surfaces, happily playing with the interaction of its texture with the paint. She tackles the latter by playing with the paint dilution, exploiting its transparency effects, or its pigment accumulations. She emphasizes the fluidity of the material, and looks in her gesture for a balance between tension and slackening, concentration and spontaneity, in order to reach the equilibrium of the composition.
The result is centered on the page, floating in a white space. The central painting feels like a calligraphic sign. The superimposition of its elements and the contrast between the density effects on its edges and the transparency at the centre give a sculptural dimension to the composition, the illusion of volumes floating in space. The colour elements are connected with one another, thus creating several layers and a depth that tells as much about space as it does about time.
In their formal simplicity, these art works confront the viewer to their own emotional expressiveness, and invite them into a spiritual journey.
Martine Guillerm