Exhibition - Wings... and scales

A little fish, a little bird..." as the song says... Delphine Sampont's world, surreal and delicate, is essentially made up of fish and birds. The lush vegetation is his scene of improbable encounters to say the least: his pictorial approach, almost naturalistic, contrasts with a graphic and colorful staging, which is discovered through his exhibition.

The drawings, idyllic in appearance, depict a much less cheerful reality. We can read his concern about the decline of biodiversity, threatened by pollution and human activities. For the artist, the use of stripes means, for example, “to wipe off the map”; and the repetition of geometric patterns symbolizes human activity and industrialization. The choice of artificial, saturated colors denounces the illusion of a magnificent world passed through the filters of social networks, botoxed, Photoshopped like the smooth and shiny images of magazine pages. Man, the first link in this happy and pretty upside-down world, is not represented: he is implied.

To draw the feathered visitors she patiently observes in her garden, Delphine Sampont favors the dry point of colored pencils and ink pads. Its elongated, atypical formats are striking. The production is extremely careful, methodical, and even “painstaking” to use the artist’s term.

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