'Corner', 'Contemplation', 'Birds', 'Back to child', 'N.Y Curtains', 'Occupation', 'Recovered memories', 'Marbles',

Oil paintings on paper mounted on canvas, 2005

This group of paintings was created during the time Cecile Desmeules Harrison spent in Ireland when she decided to leave France, her friend and family and stepped out of her comfort zone.

Those paintings reflect the introspection the artist experienced and her first attempts to use images in a symbolic way. 

 For this series, Cécile Harrison concentrated on the relationship between the human space and subjects within the daily newspaper. This representation enables C.H. to touch the individual and collective memory, and to manufacture direction within cultural and intellectual problems. How is it a contemplative approach is regarded as a reaction, taking into consideration the chaotic visual environment we are living in? In the observation of the daily newspaper, what we call “micro-events” can affect the perception of our current situation, and finally the feeling can have a figurative and contemplative effect within current artistic reality, The artist accompanies some paintings with texts or poems inspired by Beckett. The contemplation of a daily newspaper, a thing unimportant and banal enabled the artist to discover signs and to create direction.

While borrowing from the iconography of the Dutch painters, C.H. manufactures an inventory of visual experiments and tries to give body to the memory. It is reminiscent, implicitly and ironically, of photography for its function of a substitute of memory to use this phenomenon.

The titles, that the artist uses, evoke memories related to childhood, the memories and history. It asserts a return to a nostalgic form of figurative pictorial representation as a reaction in the modern world.