“Oh my God! Oh my God! “I’m going to be late!” the white rabbit shouts as he rushes down the attic stairs. Sylvie Selig (Nice, 83 years old) is amused to see him so nervous, she who has been waiting for recognition from the art world for 80 years. Untamed hair like a milky cloud over a dazzling smile. Celadon green eyes that shine before the fusses, jumps and capers of the white rabbit in the middle of her workshop. A spacious room, with a very high ceiling, in the heart of Pigalle, a neighborhood that has become a decoration for tourists in search of sensations. Huge windows, a broken sofa where she reads Robert Walser. He has always loved words. The artist sprinkles quotes and reflections from poets and writers in her works, always in English. Theirs is a country kitchen in the heart of Paris where the perfumes of childhood float and Lewis Carroll slowly prepares wonderful dishes whose secret no one else knows. The table is prepared for Weird Family [familia extraña], a collection of sculptures made from old dressmaker’s mannequins enriched with found materials and objects. “The Weird Family It emerged from my learnings and findings. These characters share my world,” she explains. Born in Nice in 1941, at 13 Sylvie Selig moved with her mother to Melbourne (Australia) and returned to Europe at 18. After a year in London, she returned to Paris and worked as an illustrator for the magazine elle. At 25 she moved to New York and worked for Esquire, New York Magazine and major publishers such as Condé Nast, Grove Press and Doubleday. At 29 years old he abandons illustration to dedicate himself completely to painting. Since then he lives and works between a house hidden among vineyards in the south of France and his Parisian workshop.
“By my ears and my mustaches! How late it has become!” The white rabbit gets impatient and hits the light wooden parquet with his paw. He wrinkles his nose; The smell of turpentine essence bothers him. Stiff ears spy out any unusual noise. Three little mice with exaggeratedly long tails pass laughing among the jars full of markers and pencils. A colony of frogs and toads croaks placidly on the desk, waiting to enter the scene in one of the artist’s creations. From a very young age, Sylvie Selig embroiders, draws, paints, sculpts and creates a very personal dream universe, a singular mythology inhabited by hybrid creatures, half human, half animal. Anthropomorphic monsters, crosses of races, varieties, opposite species. Bearded men with rabbit ears, naked women with enormous hair. Mermaids with feather scales, fish with the head of a child. Tormented nature, tentacular leaves, poisonous flowers.
Dreaming and imagining are vital needs for Sylvie Selig, who invents bizarre stories and fables that she captures on paper. The result are storyboards tightrope walkers, extravagant scripts that form the starting point of all his creations. Inspired by cinema, literature and art history, the exclusively figurative work of this protean artist often reveals one-way loves, devilish masquerades, infernal cavalcades. Frustrated seductions. Implicit relationships. Enigmatic connections. Stories of dysfunctional families, of problematic relationships, of sexual tensions that cause most conflicts.
Like Penelope, Sylvie Selig weaves her dreams and draws them with a marker – almost always blood red or jet black – on pieces of linen that she embroiders incessantly and assembles to infinity. “My embroidery allows me to prolong my thoughts and my life,” she says. Drawings of centaurs with donkey caps and minotaurs with their legs planted on the ground; tributes to Pablo Picasso; naked men, women and children whose attitudes evoke the iconography of ancient statues, represented by pieces of columns from which the heads of Aphrodite or weeping kuroi emerge (as happens in Even Hellenic Statues Can Shed Tears, 2020).
Seemingly innocent, Sylvie Selig’s works reveal a world full of contradictions, just like our own. Curious, sometimes mysterious visions that arouse tender and terrifying emotions at the same time. Where does this half-kidnapped flower-girl come from, hanging upside down on a clothesline by naked hare-men? (Yesterday’s boys’ laundry, 2020)? What do these men with masks with very long noses accuse this crying teenager wrapped in a net of? (Boys don’t cry, 2019)? “Excessiveness gives me immeasurable freedom,” says the artist. A painting more than 50 meters long tells the story of a hare who helps a young refugee whom representatives of order and law want to expel to a country at war (Stateless, 2017-2019). Goya, Paula Rego and Louise Bourgeois accompany her in these fantastic dreams, a melancholic journey that, like life, always ends badly. “Not always,” she clarifies.
A monumental canvas measuring 2.20 meters high by… 140 meters long tells the odyssey in a river of a girl and two boys and their encounter with contemporary art (River of no Return, 2023 – ongoing). The canvas exhibits and unfolds a continuous epic, as if it were a emaki Japanese. This masterful work is part of the exhibition dedicated to him by the MacLyon Museum until July 7, 2024 and reflects his vital need to create endless paintings. Not to disappear before having finished them.
