ABOUT - ABOUT
Ema Duval's work is composed of contemporary abstract forms drawn from an urban imaginary. Its singular installations thus transpose fragments of architectures, of forms that it invents or re-appropriates. Colored cotton threads, scotch papers, electrician's barn ... are materials that allow him to express himself.
Through delicate processes, such as embroidery or folding, these elements are assembled with remarkable thoroughness; a way to patiently record the time of the work in the work.
The embroidery stitches thus become temporal sliders and end up forming enigmatic adornments, forms of writing projected in space, punctuations, colored rosaries with uses to be invented.
From the meeting of materials and know-how that are at first off-beat and somewhat incoherent, unexpected assemblages and hybrid combinatorial games are born, between which sometimes some domestic objects (sponges, feather dusters, elastics, coils ...) come to maintain a strange discussion; a syncretism of sub-culture, of DIY cleverly orchestrated. Mixture echoing the collection "the meaning of style" written in 1979 by the sociologist Dick Hebdige. In this book, he wrote: "The sub-cultural handyman, like the author of a surrealist collage, juxtaposes two seemingly incompatible realities and this is where the explosive encounter takes place. This explosion remains a rather joyful impression, of an enigmatic and elegant poetry.