"Happy Hour" Print

Fleur Spolidor is a french artist born in Paris who lived in Zurich and San Francisco and recently moved to Amsterdam. Daughter of a metallurgist engineer and a Freudian psychotherapist, she enjoys reading nonsense literature and adventure novels. She earned a M.F.A degree in Art History from a french University and subsequently taught Art History and Fine Art at the same university and in private Schools of Design. In 2004 she moved to California and started a successful business, teaching art classes in french to kids and adults. Spolidor has a knack for learning new art techniques: from stained glass to virtual reality painting. While playing with different techniques, she pushes her work towards contemporary issues like the never ending need to protect women’s rights and the accelerating global warming. Her main body of work called “Alice”, depicts the different characters of Lewis Carroll’s book in modern San Francisco with a vintage flair. She paints them over layers of found materials like plastic, fabric, metal, paper in an effort to recycle and reuse instead of discarding. In her other series called “Paris Flood” Spolidor mixes images of a century ago with photos found in the news. She mixes traditional and modern, digital and analog to try to reconnect the spectator with the scene he’s looking at. When we look at an old photograph, time gives a romantic patina to the event, we forget the suffering to only see the surrealism of the scene. When Spolidor superimposes old and new images, the catastrophes take another dimension. The past becomes a witness of our limited memory and our inability to plan for long term future. Superimposition works as a revealer. As we look through the membranes of the image, we go back to the essential. Spolidor’s figurative work drifts between nonsense and satyre, between past and present, to reflect on mankind’s short memory and the recurring mistakes we keep on making.