Drawing on our iconographic references to animate her visual works as well as her short and feature films, Vergine Keaton creates moving worlds that are both familiar and intriguing, poetic and hypnotic.
Her training in illustration and graphic design led Vergine Keaton to begin working with still images. Fascinated by existing representations, she wondered what would happen if they came to life, opening the door to a thousand possible scenarios. To put them into practice, she taught herself animation. In this way, she developed the two facets of her work: the visual arts that expose themselves, and the cinema that unfolds its narrative. " In both cases, I start with an image, a situation, and work intuitively, looking for how this subject will enter the dance," she explains.
Like a child's temptation in front of a toy, she likes to "put her hands in the images and see what's going on, discover how they organize themselves to create something that's akin to myth". Having lived close to the countryside, she is sensitive to rocks, animals and nature, the leitmotif of her work. She seeks to "draw the eye to things that aren't supposed to be in the foreground" : simple, sparse motifs that belong to the collective unconscious, and which resonate with each of us by raising elementary questions. Her aim is to "unfold them so that the detail becomes an event". By decentering the gaze in this way, she finds beauty, life and precision where we least expect them.
Through the magic of movement, gesture and time, she reveals how elements that coexist separately can articulate together. For her, bringing illustrations to life is like "sculpting a block of time". She doesn't impose a format on herself, but stops when the duration of the animation seems right. Her first short film, Je criais contre la vie, ou pour elle (I cried against life, or for it), made in 2009, animated around a hundred popular 19th-century engravings, so that fallow deer turn against the dogs that chase them, in a landscape that is reborn. In his latest animated film, The Tasmanian Tiger, released in 2018, an anxious animal circles a zoo enclosure, while a glacier abruptly melts and a volcano erupts. Nature's fury seems to hasten his extinction, while it transforms itself only to be reborn, offering a verdant environment to the animal, free to rejoin its fellow creatures. A corpus of 200 ancient paintings served as the basis for this rostrocopie (an animation technique that brings images to life). " I really enjoyed working with them, because it's a global adventure that unfolds a still image in time," enthuses Vergine Keaton.
This experience led her to desire longer temporalities, which in turn led her to multi-screen installations and narratives, which are presented from Times Square, New York, to the Centre Pompidou-Metz, via the Galerie Miyu in Paris. For this visual art, the artist explains: "I choose images that appeal to me, and I let myself go much more to immediacy, searching through the images." These two exercises have music in common, for which Vergine Keaton calls on creators from the independent music scene. She is currently working on her first feature film, based on an Italian Renaissance battle painting, which she hopes to complete by 2027. A rigorous process, it requires a script and a long, precise cut. Like Georges Méliès, the illusionist of images at the beginning of the 20th century, Vergine Keaton seeks to find solutions to the challenges she sets herself using very simple means, happy to find an artisanal rather than technical response. She sees the future as an exploration of very different formats, leaving the door open to an infinitely poetic imagination.
