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An invitation to enter a universe, which maintains art resolutely within a world of beauty, harmony, and colours. An opening onto our times and the freedom of the creative process enabled by digital art. A discovery of works, which send us back to essentials while acknowledging the pleasure of an aesthetic journey, and lead us to open out onto others as well as onto ourselves… For these creations find their source of inspiration in what constitutes our humanity and gives us confidence in it: the joy of living, energy, happiness and enthusiasm. Emotions which this site invites you to share during a visit which creates the conditions for an authentic artistic encounter.
             
    I will briefly evoke my career and my artistic approach in order to facilitate the interpretation of the paintings and digital creations presented in this site.

  
    After training as an art historian at the Ecole du Louvre and at the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie de Paris, I worked in cultural communication for a number of years before definitively turning to painting in 1997.
 		 
 
   
Both my training and my previous work have enabled me to create from the start a mature work, inspired by my passion for colour. Indeed, colour is an essential aspect of my work, both as brute material and as the privileged means of expression of my research. I have been drawing since I was a child and only turned to abstract art in 1992, privileging acrylics because of the technical freedom they offer. My paintings are structured by dynamic compos-tions from which emerge imaginary spaces. Their construc-tion is based on a balance of forms and a very rich range of colour. Abstraction is for me the dimension in which to explore the representation of an internal world. Its formal transcription, whether on canvas or through digital means, is always subject to rigorous criteria governing the control of balance and the dynamism of forms. The importance of compositional structure, of movement, and of the permanent interaction of colour, is the thread linking all my works together.
 
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In 2002, I started to work with digital media, and elaborated a concept of digital painting in which the material is extracted from my previous paintings.I photographed hundreds of details from my paintings,then digitalised them and classified them. I thus had on my computer a virtual palette. Over  three  years  of  research andcreation, I have developed a style of creation where the pictorial element meets reality through the subjects I photograph: natural elements, landscapes, flowers or portraits…I integrate these elements into my digital paintings in order to create imaginary representations or dreamscapes.The objective representation of the subject is undermined and used but stays a consciously vindicated aspect of reality which is integrated in my work. It is this meeting, that between my imaginary vision of the world and its objective reality as expressed through photography, which I have been exploring with passion. These lateral relations have opened up the doors to the most creative means of proposing my own vision of the world.
    
       
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about my work    
         
 
Marie Péjouan’s works as a painter and digital artist go hand in hand. On first encountering her works, one is struck by an exacting aesthetic standard, an acute sense of composition, a unique harmony of color, and an oneiric universe laden with a considerable power of suggestion. To look at a work by Marie Péjouan is to receive  an invitation  to  enter  a  different  world – or more exactly, an invitation to travel. This trip will start in the world she suggests but rapidly move into a more personal voyage through one’s particular universe.
   
   
The resources of this work reside in its power, with each new encounter, to make us discover in ourselves a new world as yet unknown. This “magic” of the encounter with the work resides perhaps in the meticulousness of the artist’s work, whose sense of detail can remind us of the Flemish primitives or of artists of the Italian Quatroccento. Each part of any work deserves to be detailed, enlarged, and  possesses the same power of evocation. When Marie Péjouan works on a theme, she makes people who thought they knew it well, or had even mastered it, rediscover it.  Thus  the huge success of her work on  the  Rio  Carnival  with  the  Cariocas  can     be explained    by   their  rediscovery  of   this  world’s  magic when seen through an artist’s lens.
 
 
Thus, Marie Péjouan’s work, in the great artistic tradition, adapts to the theme it has imposed on itself. As much at ease with a family theme, a floral one, or even with work on a commercial brand, her vision and the works which arise from it lead us each time to rediscover her subject while producing a deep sense of aesthetic satisfaction.

Eric ALBERT
   
         
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The artist’s remarks, intended for the curious  
         
  On the passage from painting to digital creation      
     
“It is certainly true that music and colour have nothing in common, yet they follow parallel paths. Seven notes, with slight modifications, suffice for any composition. Why should it be any different in the plastic arts?”
Henri Matisse
  
      This passage consists in an evolution, not a rupture. It is the consequence of an opening onto the freedom in creative processes that digital means offer the artist.
Technology is in the service of creation, and not the contrary. I have kept to my painting techniques while reconstituting virtual palettes, and the digital pen replaces my brush.
It also constitutes an evolution in terms of the creative process.
My paintings are abstract, I start from a white canvas, painting being the transcription of an inner reality. My work when creating digital works is based on my photographs – a subjective eye looking upon reality – whose theme, matter, movement, … - will constitute so many elements with which I will create, just as the painter uses the different colours on his palette.		    
 

On reflection in my work

      
     
“Now that art has taken itself for the ever-more unique subject of art, it is time to turn self-reference upside down, so that art should prove itself through its works, rather than have the work legitimate itself through a proposition concerning what art could be.”
Jean-Philippe Domecq
  
      A sort of conformism proper to cultural institutions has established in the present state of artistic creation a pre-eminence of the concept. The status of the work of art itself has never ceased being put in question since the radical move represented by Duchamp’s urinal shown in New-York in 1917, which transforms the most trivial industrial object into Art.
The work is thus created by the way the artist looks upon society. It is the result of reflection or of a theory driven by a particular discourse. This discourse is the key to the work of art, and, without a discursive approach, the work stays closed to its viewer.

Regarding this tendency, my ambition is different.
I am much more interested in showing than in demonstrating, in letting emotion express itself, that atemporal connection which lets us look in the same way at Boticelli’s Spring or at a Rothko monochrome.
I depend upon the plastic of art, its power and its language, to bear witness to the world I live in and to carry a singular interpretation of it. I take from photographs and digital creation the way to play with reality, cross the frontier between it and its imaginary double, in a word, to create.		    
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