This is an abstract Amazonian rain forest.
An impenetrable forest of signs where patterns and colours call out, provoke each other, brush against each other and collide, but always end up flying away in a soft cotton, wool or silk. On its edge, embroidered on the label, a strong name: Mapoésie.
The title of a manifesto? Yes, but more than that, perhaps that of a graphic epic poem that Elsa Poux has been writing alone or with a group of invited artists since 2010.
In the style of interwoven narratives of the antiquity, this designer who graduated from the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris, tangles up the patterns with her own personal mythology. Inspired by ethnic cultures and crafting know-how, Elsa Poux, returns, season after season, to patterns that she has taken from here and there; from the robe of an African king, Kuba, or from the map of the Mayan sky, interpreting and exhausting them down to the thread.
Out of this long pure work, a unique repertoire of diverse contemporary and crossbred shapes was born whose codes and secrets she enjoys mixing.
Whether they electrify themselves upon coming into contact with acid yellow or are surprised by the caress of a powdery pink, her boundless variations of colorful lines are inherited from a queen of abstraction: Sonia Delaunay. The Russian artist, known for her avant-gardist research on rhythms and colours, had already declared in 1923 that her fabric drawings were as much “poetry” as “the expression of a state of mind” and “the essential basis of her painting”.
Nearly a century later, Elsa Poux does not say anything different, she, who was able to rapidly impose a very personal style and a strong graphic identity whose modernity does not exclude any references to far-reaching or ancient traditions. In fact it is quite the opposite. Elsa has chosen, for example, to have her creations screen-printed using a frame. A craft technique by which shapes and threads appear and are composed gently, colour after colour, with each passage of the frame …
