Tes feuilles aussi conserveront une éternelle verdure

RESUME

Muriel Persil was born in Paris in 1966 into a family of artists.
From 1986, she studied at the Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris and then at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She continued her training in the studio of the Chilean painter Carlos Sotomayor (1911-1988) where she developed her taste for anatomy, the nude and portraiture.
Between 1989 and 1990, she trained at the CNACFAG [graphic arts training centre] and obtained her diploma as an assistant decorator. For many years, she focused her professional activity on decor painting in parallel with her pictorial research.
Muriel Persil exhibits her paintings regularly in France (Paris, Montpellier, Céret, Perpignan) and in Spain (Barcelona, Gerona). The large figurative formats show scenes of “refuge nature”, luxuriant where the body appears immersed. The elements and the fusion with the organic world are privileged access routes to the human soul.
In 2013, after moving to the south of France, Muriel turned to ceramic sculpture, which she studied as a self-taught artist. “Something happened with ceramics” she says, an encounter that causes a break in her trajectory. She found in working with clay (mainly stoneware or, more rarely, porcelain) a favourite medium for research into volume, capable of translating the syncretism of man with nature.
If this medium engages the artist towards a new gestural and corporal approach, the major themes which irrigated her painting are always present: the living, death as a “crossing”, the elements as a space of metamorphosis of the bodies. With the aquatic theme, which she explores more and more in the sculptural and coral pieces, Muriel returns to an aesthetic dear to the Romantics and Symbolists. Associated with the “passage” – between life and death, the real and the imaginary, the universal and the private self – water translates the marvellous territory where the deep self is probed against the determinism and scientism of the 19th century. Metampsychosis, which designates the migration of souls, combines these paradoxical worlds that question immortality. Reappropriating this project, Muriel Persil revisits myths or lets the imaginary and the fantastic lead the hand, granting the modelling the power of ontogeny. Proliferation of forms, agglomerations, outgrowths and thrusts of matter are all forces of life that articulate with burial and disappearance. The application of engobes or glazes is never premeditated but emanates from a physical necessity that may impose itself on the artist after the first firing. Enamelling then becomes an adventure in colour that is as dynamic as the plastic.
Since 2019, she alternates the creation of monumental sculptures with pieces that mark the history of decorative ceramics (cup, fountain, vase, mirror). She plans to create pieces that combine blown glass with her creations.
Muriel Persil is represented in Paris by the Olivier Castaing Gallery [School Gallery] and by the Lligat Gallery in Perpignan [Occitanie] which is devoting a first Solo Show to her.