Draughtswoman, she fills her sketchbooks and drawings with colourful, hybrid figures, nourished by comics, music and the Japanese mythology of yōkai.
Draughtswoman, she fills her sketchbooks and drawings with colourful, hybrid figures, nourished by comics, music and the Japanese mythology of yōkai. Exhibition at Galerie Eva Vautier: « a rose is a petunia is a mimosa » (14 June – 10 September 2022). Nathalie Gilles favours curiosity and pleasure over the sole obsession with devoting herself to a systematised artistic practice, developing a very personal universe made of drawings. Populated by colourful and joyfully monstrous figures, she juxtaposes and mixes very diverse references (comics, music…), blurring the trails with fantasy. In her work, she favours curiosity and the pleasure of creation rather than the sole obsession with a systematic artistic practice. She very regularly draws this freedom from her drawing practice. Her sketchbooks are like a miniature studio, easily portable, in which she develops a universe mingling observation and dreaminess, populated by hybrid and colourful creatures, sometimes grotesque. In this fantasised relationship with reality, from the Japanese mythology of the Yōkai, the disquieting strangeness of Henry Darger, the symbolic, dark and spectral fantasies of Alfred Kubin or the delicate evanescence of the watercolours of Ernst Haeckel, her work draws on very diverse influences. Certain tales, fantasies with grating black humour, also feed her work: Lewis Carroll, Roland Topor, Roald Dahl or Paul Bowles… “Mi-kawaï”: this is how a Japanese journalist described her creations, which could be translated as “falsely cute”. A dark naivety.