Tatiana Defraine
Horses & Ghosts

30 March 2023 - 13 April 2023

“The moon has set", a short lyrical fragment by the ancient Greek poet Sappho who expresses a refined and melancholic nocturnal reflection (1st original edition: 6th century BC).

A visual rustling, impetuous, light and entrancing moves from the eyes of the spectator to an indefinite bodily vastness that envelops the air inside and out, between the interstices of the canvas and all around until it returns calamitously to its material incarnation, to the soft brushstrokes of the enveloping pictorial works of Tatiana Defraine.

Everything moves, supported by the wavy lines and targeted trajectories.

But where do these benighted riding figures come from and above all where are they headed?

Here they are in a window of colour, taken in the timeless moment of their eternal journey, uninhibited, proud and naïve at the same time, daughters of the nature that cloaks them.

Their whispered and ethereal gestures seem to do nothing more than what that moment has: performing guided by hedonistic symphonies, between earth and sky.

In «Horses and Ghosts», the ground seems to tremble due to the bold and trotting ride, in perfect harmony with the typical rhythm of the flock of leaves on the trees, where, moved heartily by the pressing wind, everything dances. In this succession of metaphorical scenes of an ambiguous character, in which it is possible to find refuge and at the same time scrutinize the threat, light and shadow chase each other among the variations of the primeval Prussian blue.

The subjects represented appear safe and nostalgic, masters of their run but alone, in a deserted and enveloping nature. Liminal places that mark the boundary between dream and reality, archetypes of an unconscious that likes to play with the foundations of psychoanalysis, glimpses of desire for the absolute and a return to a primordial state, with a strongly contemporary character, in which gender differences cultural contradictions are deliberately thrown into the limbo of nonsense.

Here, among vivid and resolutely identifying brushstrokes, we find ourselves in the throbbing elsewhere of cold fiery colours in which everything praises itself, often presenting itself as bare and authentic, free and abysmal.

 

Tatiana Defraine, born in 1986, lives and works in Bordeaux. After earning a master's degree from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, Defraine first studied painting in Frankfurt, Germany and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, the latter city where she lived and worked for several years.

Tatiana Defraine works almost exclusively with paint. With a mixture of love, humor and cruelty, her paintings denounce gender stereotypes transmitted or imposed by stereotypical contemporary phenomena. Painting becomes the means to explore the contradictions in the various attempts to represent women as mere objects of desire.

Therefore, Tatiana gives us a funny, arrogant and uninhibited femininity. Her female creatures are timeless, immeasurable, primitive and contemporary and seek to embody painting itself, as they speak a decidedly personal language, with and in the painting.

Her work has so far been exhibited, including solo and group exhibitions, in Europe, including: Deborah Bowmann in Brussels, Exile in Vienna, Acappella in Naples, L'Ascensore in Palermo and so on. His work was recently exhibited at the Art-o-rama fair in Marseille in collaboration with the Parisian gallery Pierre Poumet.