The dimension which Claudine Grisel’s work inhabits is an openly mythological one, a harmonious blend of classical and personal mythology. Why classical? Because, when she attended the academy, she would devote much of her time to copying the classics. Why personal? Because, following her emotions, she wished to project them onto the canvas in her own language, a language deeply rooted in humanistic culture. One can ultimately say that her heroes, gods and demigods, are her own emotions. And that is how her work generates a mythology of its own, the artist being its pantheon.
if one were to choose a single term that best encompasses all of Claudine Grisel’s work, energy would be the most obvious word, her art being the interaction between the energy given out by the cosmos and the one receiving it. It is definitely a mystique which is expressed in a mythological plastic language, through the medium of light, as in a state of grace. The chromatic vibration of the background, which may cause the subject to appear blurred and therefore difficult to perceive, is indeed a means to express the inexpressible via the light it emanates. Within this inexpressible world, form is translated into a mythological language where classicism meets contemporary representation… Man is simultaneously a receiver and a transmitter of energy… The human body is captured in its cosmic immateriality.
Claudine Grisel is the finely-tuned demiurge of a universe of myth that she works and transforms, bringing the dream world to our eyes through the act of transcending light.
