In Jessica Nodin's work, you have to look alternately at drawings and titles.
Reading the cartels, one comes across a star-bellied breadstick, a psynocchio or an origin of the mould that would make one smile even if they were not accompanied by their representations. Sometimes you come close to a teenage boy's silly joke, as with that finger in the zen or with the choconde.
And when we look at the corresponding drawings, the surprise is even greater: we see an artist who has tried to bring these crazy suitcase words to life in the most conscientious way possible.
Welcome to a world where the absurd is king, recognized, respected. A world that has an assumed "gore" side but treated with an infinite delicacy of strokes, which the use of the rotring or the grey pencil allows. The drawing is perfect, the details are meticulously represented, the work itself is meticulously finished: "I always leave a lot of white margin in my drawings, so that they appear really pure".
All the interest of the draftswoman's work comes from this way of holding both ends of the story: at one end, the derisory pun and the trash or gore of inspiration; at the other end, the depth of a well thought-out work and the perfection sought in the plastic realization.
"Linking the fields of health, knowledge and progress to the forms of language (written, spoken, formalized, symbolic, figurative...), I play with evil, I suspect heresy, I bite, I plagiarize, I joke", as the artist says on his site, to finish with a simple and... voluntarily open sentence: "All this is not very harmless (but in fact it is)".
Let's start again...
The belly dancer makes you smile, but she clearly evokes the pain these young dancers must feel when they get on their first pointe shoes.
On the other hand, there is probably something more ambiguous with the Choconde, but Jessica Nodin fully assumes it: "I recently exhibited it in Montauban. In front of this woman and her black eye, a visitor on my Facebook page told me that he didn't know whether to laugh or cry. That suits me perfectly".
"I like to work on the idea of madness, I like to work on an absurdity and see how it can lead to something deeper, even if it's just a detail. That's why I like drawing: it allows you to focus on the detail that kills. I keep painting for more peaceful works".
Jessica Nodin trained at the Beaux-Arts of Nîmes before moving on to many artistic fields: illustration, stop-motion, collages, etc...
Today, she keeps a creative activity in all fields: she draws, but also works for a designer as well as for Véronique Corroy, creator of the brand of handcrafted jewellery Louise Moncha.
Jessica Nodin will exhibit in May in Carla-Bayle, in the Soul Papers exhibition, organized by Phanette de Oliveira at the cultural space Les Coucarils.
Nicolas Sarazin