Nathalie Gilles

Nathalie Gilles favors curiosity and pleasure over the sole obsession of devoting herself to a systematized artistic practice, developing a very personal universe of drawings. Populated with colorful and joyfully monstrous figures, she juxtaposes and mixes very diverse references (comics, music…) blurring the tracks with fantasy.

In her work, she favors curiosity and the pleasure of creation rather than the sole obsession of a systematic artistic practice. She regularly draws on this freedom in her drawing practice. Her notebooks are like a miniature workshop easily transportable, in which she elaborates a universe mixed with observations and dreamlike, populated with hybrid and colored creatures, sometimes grotesque.

In this fantasized relationship to reality, from the Japanese mythology of the Yōkai, the disturbing strangeness of Henry Darger, the symbolic, dark and spectral fantasies of Alfred Kubin or the delicate evanescence of Ernst Haeckel’s watercolors, his work draws on a wide range of influences. Some stories, fantasies with a dark humor, also feed his work: Lewis Caroll, Roland Topor, Roald Dalh or Paul Bowles…

“Mi-kawai” is how a Japanese journalist described her creations, which could be translated as “falsely cute”. A black naivety.