Manon Paya

Lives and works in: Paris

Biography

Manon Paya

Manon Paya was born in 1989 in Nîmes, in the South of France. At 18, she left her hometown to study in Paris: after two years spent in preparatory literary classes, she began a four-year course in Art History at the Ecole du Louvre, before joining the Institute. National Heritage, where after five years she obtained a diploma in heritage restorer, graphic arts section.

In parallel with her studies, she developed her artistic activity. Passionate about drawing from a young age, she trained from thirteen to eighteen in the studio of artist Pascal Thouvenin. Very quickly, she turned towards hyperrealism, with a particular interest in the human figure, which she explored through different graphic techniques. She never uses tracing, spotlighting, or squaring. Her work is based on the observation and interpretation of personal photographs of which she modifies the compositions, in order to extract the essential: a face, a silhouette, a comical scene gone unnoticed ...

After having devoted several years to making portraits in pastel, she chose to question the relationship between drawing and photography by making a series of works in graphite pencil and cut-out paper. The faces are then crumpled, torn, the border between the drawing and the real image blurred. Gradually moving away from the pure portrait, while continuing to give a central place to individuals, she then explores drawing as a support for memory: through small formats made in graphite pencil or India ink, she reinterprets her family photographs, sunny summer days of his childhood in the South of France through amusement parks populated by strange mascots. Although she favors black and white for these melancholy pastilles, she does not abandon color, which she reintroduces in her most recent works.

Thus, at a time characterized by an overabundance of images, Manon Paya operates a sorting, a selection. Taking care to observe, she tries to immortalize in her “graphic snapshots” the poetry of a look, an attitude, moments of life that time and the dematerialization of media have ended up erasing.

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