EXPO Fabienne Contat, Gisèle Depery and Ryōichi Isoda

xcerpt - Gisèle: «With Fabienne, we met in sixth grade. A common interest in drawing, reading, and imaginary worlds brought us together. Then, we lost sight of each other... Thirty-three years later, we found ourselves by chance in Cluses. We had both studied art: one at the Arts Décoratifs de Paris, the other at the Beaux-Arts de Lyon, then at the Faculty of Plastic Arts in Aix-en-Provence. Art is, for both of them, a hymn to life, to love, to the fluidity and sensuality of forms and materials. Then Fabienne met Ryōichi Isoda, and I leave him the thread of the story here.” - Fabienne: "Even chance encounters are due to connections made in previous lives." Haruki Murakami In the spring of 2021, I met "virtually" my friend and painter Ryōichi Isoda. I was fascinated by his childlike world, naïve, sensitive and colorful, populated with animals and strange characters, which he brings to life under his brushes, in oil paint, bold pastel or gouache. We engaged in a game of poetic correspondence: from Japan, he sent me every day by email a drawing to which I replied with a simple little poem, written on the spot, like a sketch. In the manner of an exquisite corpse, I attached my words to a detail, a color, a character from his drawings, and so on... Ryōichi’s drawings ended up traveling all the way to France. I am now its guardian; they are precious to me. But I couldn’t keep them to myself. The opportunity to exhibit them is, for me, a way to thank him for his generosity and to continue to weave this bond, following the red thread that unites our souls. Our six-hand exhibition will weave threads of life through the representation of nature. Carpets, made from photographs and woven at the point of Aubusson or tufted, will show the different thicknesses and materialities of a flower, the fluidity of a river or the reflection of ice in a snow rut. Watercolors, pastels, ceramics and precious gold chandeliers will mingle intimately, composing a singular color of life, a sensual and poetic perception of the eternal feminine in love."