Elka LEONARD
French painter born in 1971.
French artist-painter, Elka Leonard is part of the lineage of women artists who, for more than seventy years, have worked to show the plurality of the feminine in the history of art.
Elka Leonard began her career as a painter in the 90s, strongly influenced by the world of comics. In an artistic and provocative way, by borrowing its lines and chromatic palette from comics, she imagines her painting as a means of defying taboos and representing aspects of human intimacy. In the 2000s, with comic strips, she associated other artistic movements such as surrealism, art deco and baroque. Then, her style is evolving, the subjects of her paintings are more engaged.
Elka Leonard frees herself from societal constraints and addresses all the themes that affect her as a woman. From domination to emancipation, it is also her journey as a woman, the expression of her own identity, of a unique style.
Her style
Elka Leonard develops a visual approach halfway between narrative figuration and surrealism.
Her painting, made of a depth of memory, mixes with great dexterity the extraordinary and the banal, scholarly and popular history, myths and philosophical ideals. From anecdotes to references, from diversion to parody, Elka Leonard dialogues with overlapping eras: the supernatural rubs shoulders with the everyday and the mythical intrudes into the modern. The world appears like a dream from which to draw new harmony.
Her painting takes shape through a multitude of protagonists who move into imaginary universes with multiple vanishing points. The decor is adorned with uninhabitable buildings and mirrors which reinforce the opposition between finite and infinite, and reflects our feeling of strangeness in the face of today’s world. An eye, both protective and interior, observes the scene and wanders through the unconscious world around it.
Attention then shifts to the multitude of details that the artist slips into her works. These small, discreet, unusual elements, seemingly innocuous, in reality constitute an extraordinary gateway to penetrate the heart of her art. Elka Leonard constructs stories that accompany the viewer in their pleasure without ever locking them into a single perspective, and always offering them the possibility of creating their own vision, their own dream.