Pencil on paper.

Description

Sandrine Llouquet has created a personal syncretism that results from her in-depth reading and research into ancient Greek philosophy, Foucault, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Jung, and the exploration of Alchemy, through to the study of religion and rituals – and especially paganism and animism. Her work is “a marriage of the uncanny and the familiar” – Freud’s Das Unheimliche – with recognisable images from a variety of different sources combined to create dream-like tableaux.

Llouquet explores ritual transformation and the transmutation of reality, which is composed of archetypal imagery. By juxtaposing recognizable elements with strange and eerie surroundings, Llouquet, much in the same guise as a psychologist, hypnotist or guru, stimulates the deepest recesses of our unconscious and memory. Drawings in the shape of mandalas explore the unconscious and manifest as visualisations of ceremonial predictions and trances. Recurrent characters populate her scenes, faceless, masked, half-animal. Referencing myriad ritualistic and cultural traditions, the compositions exude an illusory higher knowledge of the world and of our place in the universe.

Description is excerpted from “Neverwhere" Exhibition Catalog, 2023, p.70.