Frédérique Tristant is a French artist born in Vannes in 1971, who lives and works in Brittany in Morbihan.
In gallery since 2018, Frédérique TRISTANT is both a specialist in semiotics, holder of a doctorate from the University of Bordeaux, and a painter whose training has been validated by a CAPES.
This dual training permeates her work, offering beyond its graphic aspect, a reflection on the nature of representation resulting from the university course on the image of bodies through the tools of reproduction (photographs, videos) and investigation scientific (radiology, scanner, MRI etc.).
From this reflection, she seeks the limit, the tension between the physical reality of skins and bodies and the dreamlike vision offered by representation: subtle recreation of this reality in a two-dimensional space materialized by a few pictorial layers finer than the epidermis.
She explains:
“As in my research on the first photographic atlas of dermatology by Dr. Hardy and Montmeja in 1868, I retouch each portrait with watercolor and acrylic paint. I appropriate a physiognomy that I reshape and remake as I wish. I refine my masks which tell women's stories like the diary of our melancholy, our absences and our sensuality”