Drawing on our iconographic references to animate her visual works such as her short and feature films, Vergine Keaton creates shifting worlds that are both familiar and intriguing, poetic and hypnotic.
Vergine Keaton's training in illustration and graphic design initially led her to work 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 bring these to life, she taught herself animation. In this way, she developed the two facets of her work: visual art on display, and cinema unfolding its narrative. "In both cases, I start with an image, a situation, and I work intuitively, exploring how this subject will come into play," she explains.
Like a child's temptation before a toy, she loves "putting her hands in images and seeing what happens there, discovering how they organize themselves to create something akin to myth." Having lived near the countryside, she is sensitive to rocks, animals, and nature, the leitmotif of her work. She seeks to "draw attention to things that aren't meant to be in the foreground" : simple and few motifs, belonging to the collective unconscious, that resonate with each of us by raising fundamental questions. She strives to "unfold them so that the detail becomes an event." By thus decentering the gaze, she finds beauty, life, and precision where it is least expected.
Through the magic of movement, gesture, and time, she reveals how elements, coexisting separately, can come 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 animation's duration seems right. Her first short film, made in 2009, * Je criais contre la vie, ou pour elle* (I Shouted Against Life, or for It ), animated around a hundred popular 19th-century engravings , causing deer to turn on the dogs chasing them in a landscape that is reborn. In her most recent animated film, * Le Tigre de Tasmanie* (The Tasmanian Tiger ), released in 2018, a restless animal paces in a zoo enclosure while a glacier melts suddenly and a volcano erupts. In unleashing its fury, nature seems to hasten its extinction, even as it transforms itself to be reborn, offering a now verdant environment for the free animal to rejoin its kind. A corpus of 200 old paintings served as the basis for this rostrocopy (an animation technique that brings images to life). "I really enjoyed working with them, because it's a comprehensive project, unfolding a still image over time," enthuses Vergine Keaton.
This experience led her to desire longer timeframes, resulting in multi-screen installations and narratives, which have been presented from Times Square in New York to the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and including the Miyu Gallery in Paris. Regarding this visual art , the artist explains: “I choose images that appeal to me and I allow myself to be much more immediate, exploring the images.” Both of these approaches share a common thread: music, for which Vergine Keaton collaborates with 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. The rigorous process requires a script and a lengthy, precise shot list. Like Georges Méliès, the illusionist of images at the beginning of the 20th century , Vergine Keaton seeks solutions to the challenges she sets for herself by employing very simple means, happy to find a handcrafted rather than a technical answer. She envisions the future as an exploration of very different formats, leaving the door open to an imagination of infinite poetry.
