First published: Summer 2018
Evelyne Postic’s artistic life began after she reached 30 years old, but the intensity with which she has created art for the last three decades stems from her childhood. Born Evelyne Mazaloubaud in Lyon, France, in 1951, she grew up in neglect and was abandoned by her parents during their divorce. Postic escaped with paper and coloured pencils into her grandparents’ kitchen, where from a window she watched coloured water flow from a nearby dyehouse into the drains. In her youth, her passion was dancing. She applied to the dance school at the Lyon Opera House, but was turned down. This was a disaster for her, and it was followed by another: at the age of five, Postic fell ill with a major pulmonary infection, and underwent a torturous treatment that was practiced in those days. Subsequently, lungs were to feature heavily, in multiple forms, in her drawings, as important “characters”.
As a teenager Postic wanted to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, but her mother opposed it. Life went on, and at 18 years old she married and started a family, putting artistic exploration to the side until she went through a new upheaval in her life. In 1989, at the age of 30, Postic divorced her husband and moved to Grenoble with her three children, where she began to make her first drawings and canvases. This practice allowed her to escape the realities of everyday life. Her first works, painted on different media, were quite graphic.
Surrounded by black contour, they resembled stained-glass windows. The large eyes and prominent mouths, painted in profile, demonstrated her interest in Africa, and its people and culture. From the beginning, Postic’s hybrid forms combined human, plant and animal in perpetual transformation. Just as Postic faced challenges in life, her characters adapted to their environment to survive.
Postic has always been passionate about science, especially biology and the metamorphosis of living beings into the process of evolution of species. Just as nature creates a multitude of forms, Postic creates her various forms inspired by her dreams and pain. She also devotes herself to sculpture that she will develop all her life by experimenting with the variety of materials like papier mâché, carved black wood, polystyrene, paper, glue, iron, concrete and seashells.
Since 1990, her work has been exhibited by Galerie des 4 Coins, Rouanne, France, by L’Oiel de Boeuf Gallery, Paris, and in the 1994 exhibition “Les Jardiniers de la Mémoire” (The Gardeners of Memory) at the Musée de la Création Franche in Bégles where her work also entered their collection. Her work is held at the collections of the Musée l’Art en Marche in Lapalisse and Cérès Franco in Lagrasse. In 1998, Postic was invited to participate in a collective exhibition in New York. The American mega-city that hosts diasporas from all over the world inspired her to create large-scale works on immigration. Hoping to start a new life, people arrive needing to face the problems of survival in a new country. Thus, the artist returns to her reflections on the adaptation of a living being to the surrounding environment.
Postic returned to Lyon in 2006 and entered the Dettinger-Mayer gallery, who specialise in contemporary drawing and primitive arts. This initiated a new stage in her artistic life as she started to exhibit new drawings of black ink on canvas. Although she often works with a lot of colour, which is more of an instinctive than a symbolic choice, sometimes she returns to monochromatic painting as if to free herself from emotional charge. In doing this, in her drawings of this time she exorcised the fears from her subconscious.
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #98
