États d'âme

Exhibition text: In the gallery space «Le salon», the gallery presents a group of works by the artist Alison Flora who paints with her own blood, collected by intravenous injection, a «soul-blood» closer to her spirit than menstrual blood. In this way, she exorcises her fears, her obsessions, her states of mind through surrealist images, where she reinvents symbols shared by the collective consciousness. Living and working in Toulouse, Alison Flora draws on the vast territory of Occitania as a source of inspiration, particularly in the folklore, myths and legends that forge its history and that are passed on from one generation to the next. Questioning the simulacrum of violence, resistance and the act of magic, blood painting can show what is meant in the maxim memento-mori, remember you will die. Blood is inherently ambivalent. It has played and continues to play a fundamental role in all civilisations. Blood defiles and purifies, it is masculine and feminine, pompous or fatal, beneficial or dangerous, and spreading it can be a crime or sacred act. The blood carries within it an instinctive emotional strength. In this, painting with human blood, but especially his own blood brings a feeling of hyper proximity in the very act of painting. Portrait of Alison Flora (Invited artist): Alison Flora (1992) lives and works in Toulouse. A graduate of the Ecole Supérieure d’Art des Pyrénées (2017), she explores the expression of a contemporary hell (stress, social anxiety, trauma...) in an obsessive and cathartic drawing practice. The result is a universe where mysticism, medievalism, fantasy and madness mix and where drawing is a unique space of expiation.