THE ENCHANTED WOODS

French artist Eva Jospin brings Y-JEAN MUN-DELSALLE on a journey inside her cardboard creations – refined, enigmatic and sensitive – that carry viewers away into a strange and magical universe, as if they have wandered inside a fairy tale

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Eva Jospin crafts hauntingly beautiful forests, rocks, grottoes, nymphaeums, cenotaphs, temples and entire universes out of cardboard, a cheap, everyday material that she sublimates through the ambition of the form and the complexity of the ornamentation. Going from the minute to the monumental, the painstaking, delicate details of her sculptures, usually found in drawing or lacemaking, contrast with their oversized dimensions. Having studied mannerist Renaissance gardens and landscape paintings and deeply influenced by the art of the Antiquity, the Baroque era, the Rococo spirit or the 19th century and its panoramas, the Paris-born artist’s fantastical woods are those of fairy tales yet are devoid of human presence. Dense, silent, obscure, full of mystery and the unknown, they possess the power of suggestion and are spaces of transition from reality to dream.

By representing objects with multiple symbolism in the collective unconscious, Eva entices viewers to plunge into her immersive surrealist landscapes that are places of infinite possibilities, while leaving them open to interpretation so audiences can compose their own narratives at the same time. “I want people to join me,” she states. “I’d like people to appropriate my artwork by going into their own imagination and make the links to a lot of different things.” Inviting us to embark on an introspective voyage, her romantic, poetic scenes are the ideal backdrop for our mental projections in which we can imagine infinite secret stories unfolding.