Interview: Léa Monnier
Luca Curci talks with Léa Monnier during VISIONS, third appointment of ANIMA MUNDI 2022, at Palazzo Bembo.

Léa Monnier started to paint regularly, in parallel to her professional activity in the health sector. She learns to paint with oil with success. She then won a few prizes. The Masters such as PJ Chaffrey, Ambille, Thibaut de Reimpré, Claude Fauchère, Cao Bei an (pupil of Zao WoKi) oriented her little by little towards mixed techniques and acrylic. She works a lot with figurative art. Finally, the Beaux-Arts of Lyon for adults led her to emphasize her personality and allowed her to make rewarding exhibitions.

Very colourist, she then makes her creations burst like fireworks. In 2019, she discovered fluid acrylic painting thanks to Anglo-Saxon painters who exported their techniques. She then created a workshop entirely dedicated to this technique in the Allier, on the banks of the canal adjacent to the Loire. It is in this calm that a new way in the happiness of painting emerges, canvas after canvas. A technique that corresponds exactly to her expressionist and sometimes abstract research, with the use of flamboyant colours.

An inimitable and always renewed creation. You can feel Léa Monnier cheerfulness in her very rhythmic paintings. There is nothing random about her technique because, as soon as certain shapes appear, her inspiration leads her to a mineral or plant theme (flowers from her garden, twisted trees on the banks of the canal, unusual landscapes). She particularly likes water: its reflections, its swirls, its waves. She uses all sorts of materials, she creates cells that air her colours, which harmonise, mix and strike the imagination! Everything is a source of inspiration for these contemporary paintings that are pleasing to the eye. One can read the movement, the mixture of colours prepared at length with the mediums dedicated to this new technique, and above all the joy!

Luca Curci – What is art for you?
Léa Monnier – Art for me is a way to express spontaneously a feeling, an emotion, reflected in colors and movements with pigments applied on a canvas, wishing to create the same emotion in my public. Art has become essential in our current lives whatever the medium (painting, sculpture, images, music, words) because it calms, resources, it resonates between the creator and the observer, creating a subtle intimacy calming the daily nervousness of our lives and too full.

LC – What are you currently working on?
LM – My current work is the result of several years of personal research on how to make running bright and joyful colors in harmony, and to organize these flows on a prepared theme (flowers, trees, nature, landscapes, sea, etc…) With rigorous gesture and after a careful preparation of the pigments in their mediums, we obtain beautiful works. At present, I extend my themes (animals, characters) and I carry out large formats which are requested to me.

LC – How is being an artist nowadays?
LM – Nowadays, the artist has to work a lot to provide an attractive, even professional creation, because there are many artists for whom it is just a hobby. When you have decided to exhibit your work in order to continue to create, you have to be persistent, perceptive in your research, improve your technique, and keep on creating every day, without wanting to repeat the same paintings over and over again! The artist has his own palette, his own technique, his own personality, but it is his own soul that he must translate and propose.

LC – Do visitors’ suggestions enrich yourself and your art?
LM – Yes of course, visitors encourage you, challenge you. You cannot work without an eye for detail, because you hope to see the emotion that you wanted to create. The criticism or the enthusiasm are always appreciated!

LC – Did your style change over the years? In which way?
LM – Yes of course, I have changed like many artists from oil to acrylic, from figurative to abstract, to arrive at a new style of painting using a fluid palette that frees the hand completely from traditional tools.

LC – Do you agree with our vision of art and what do you think about the theme of the exhibition?
LM – Yes, of course, because my personal vision is only about nature which touches me more and more every day, and which I try to translate with my contemporary technique. Nature will stay unchanged if a man does destroy it. We must keep its rules, its secrets, through contemplation and then in art. Since always, we refer to it, and if we save all the works inspired by it, we save a little of our planet!

LC – In which way the artwork presented in our exhibition is connected with the exhibition’s theme?
LM – I make a lot of paintings of flowers, trees, aquatic and terrestrial plants, calm or agitated waters, and atypical landscapes often devastated by human aggressions. All this seem to fit with the kind of work you want to show. I also like to reproduce surrealist animals, extinct or not. In addition, I try not to use polluting products such as turpentine for oil!

LC – Do you think ITSLIQUID GROUP can represent an opportunity for artists?
LM – For this exhibition, certainly « Its liquids group » is an opportunity that allowed me to be represented thanks to you at the Biennale 2022 in Venice. It is at the same time a formidable discovery allowing to meet other painters, appreciate the diversity of the artistic universes, to compare oneself, and even to evaluate oneself, which is always beneficial for its own progression. For my future as a painter I cannot say yet, except to think that I have been seen, that I am maybe known a little better, and that my value will increase?

LC – Did you enjoy cooperating with us?
LM – Yes of course, the delivery of the paintings in a bit of a hurry went wonderfully well. We were able to follow all the services offered by internet. It seems that the exhibition is a success thanks to your communication actions.

LC – What are your suggestions about our services? Is there something more we can provide to artists?
LM – The communication via email with the artists is good, although not enough focus on how to do it, and how it works. This exhibition is great because it allows them to be shown and to open to the international art scene. I have the impression that the sales phase is forgotten, even if it is the most important thing when you invest in an exhibition.