E Popeia

The poetics of refined memory

Popeia comes from Charente-Maritime. She says she entered life as one might enter a deserted shop: no one said ‘hello’ to her. And if she’d been a meteorologist, she would have summed up her life with a simple saying: ‘Everything in its own time’.

Through her artistic approach – which she refuses to categorise as either figurative or expressionist – she sets out its boundaries from the outset with a sharp sense of humour:

‘In art, I’ve never wanted to be a pushover. I’m too afraid of ending up in a mess. I draw on my memories: a memory isn’t a photograph, it’s a sediment. As an artist, I don’t copy; I recreate what has survived oblivion. Memory acts as a filter: it eliminates the anecdotal and superfluous details, retaining only the essential – the emotional framework of the subject. I take my papers and cover them with the colours I feel.”

The primacy of sensation over vision

By moving away from the physical model, our artist frees themselves from the tyranny of detail. The process of recollection brings about a natural refinement that distils the form. We do not remember an exact colour; we remember the warmth of a light or the melancholy of a place.

A poetic and synaesthetic reconstruction

E Popeia does not seek optical truth, but sensory truth. She translates synaesthetic perceptions — such as the wind, a sound or the emotion of a moment — into vibrant forms and nuances. Memory reinvents reality through the prism of the senses. What the artist puts down on paper or canvas is not the object itself, but the profound resonance of that object within her psyche.

In this sense, for E Popeia, abstraction is no longer a break with reality, but the logical extension of a refined memory.

L'artiste peintre E Popeia pose pour la photo pour sa page d'exposition dans la galerie d'art Les Koronin

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