Solenn Marrel

Born in Paris in 1974. Lives and works in France.

Solenn Marrel has always drawn. After graduating from high school, she focused on applied arts. She graduated from the École Estienne and is now a graphic designer and typographer, a profession she now practices part-time. This allowed her to discover art history and the practice of painting. Ten years ago, she began evening classes at the Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris (professors Juliano Caldeira, Alberto Cont, and Ulysse Bordarias), which revealed her vocation as a painter. Solenn Marrel has recently exhibited in Vence, for the collective exhibition Paradoxes Naturels, at the Agapé Gallery, at the Génie de la Bastille Gallery, at the Espace Beaurepaire for the Gutmann prize in Paris, but also at the Espace Culturel Sorano and the Galerie Openbach in Vincennes and regularly in Montreuil.

“My work revolves around three main themes: landscape, still life and portraiture. Every encounter, whether intimate or chance, every walk or everyday object, can inspire a new project. My creations are often based on personal photographs or sketches made on the spot.

I begin with preparatory studies, assembling, extracting or recomposing fragments of images. My approach oscillates between large format, to bring out abstraction from a detail, and smaller, more intimate media, conducive to intimate contemplation. I like to work in series, exploring different chromatic variations and spatial compositions.

Although I experiment with many techniques—engraving, monotype, watercolour, gouache, acrylic, oil—dry pastel occupies a central place in my practice. It is with this medium that I feel most free and connected to the material. I apply it in thick layers, often mixed with pure pigments, to create dense and luminous textures. This process reveals the vibrational intensity of the colours and gives the surface a tactile and vibrant presence. Dry pastel allows me to fully explore the expressive richness of colour, which for me is an essential language, capable of conveying the emotion, light and energy specific to each subject.

Light in the Forest – Work in Progress
My current work explores the forest as a space of contrast, between the dazzling sunlight filtered through the foliage and the mysterious depth of the shaded areas. Through large-format works created with dry pastels on paper, I seek to convey these variations in light, these enveloping atmospheres where clarity emerges or dissolves. The pastel, which I apply in dense layers mixed with pure pigments, allows me to make the colour vibrate and to model the material, creating an almost tactile surface.

I work in series, sometimes in polyptychs, to establish a rhythm, a circulation of the gaze, like a movement through the landscape. This visual journey invites us to traverse the space of the painting as we would walk through the forest, between bursts of light, deep silences and suspended moments.”