Original artwork.

In this captivating work, Marie-Josée Desjardins presents an enigmatic female portrait where softness, strangeness, and symbolic strength meet. The fragmented face, marked by a doubled gaze, immediately draws the eye and challenges the idea of fixed or conventional beauty. The red hair, the crown of apples, and the delicate presence of the rabbit create a world that is at once poetic, surreal, and deeply evocative.

Louise Moillon’s still lifes are part of the young Nordic tradition, particularly the subgenre of “laid tables,” juxtaposing foods meant to delight the eye and stimulate the appetite. Inspired by this Parisian painter, the work Blanche brings together still life, portrait, and animal figure in a shared formal and symbolic exploration. Considered as a whole, these subjects express a need to return to the origin, to a common source of life.

True to her practice, the artist explores representations of femininity through an image that is reconstructed, altered, and then reinterpreted in paint. The embroidered contours and visible layered elements add a material dimension that evokes both collage and memory. With its distinctive visual language, blending contemporary sensitivity, symbolism, and surrealist accents, Blanche offers a luminous and unsettling presence in which imagination becomes a way of reinventing portraiture.