Alexandra vassilikian - french living painter, of Armenian - German origin born in 1946 in Bucharest, Romania In her work - paintings, drawings, pastels, photography, thematic cycles based upon a single motif studied over long spans of time - she tries to represent the interpenetration between the objective reality, her own subconscious world, and the transcendence of the subject.

"A painter, above all; but a photographer as well. Armenian, for sure; Romanian, no longer; French, in consequence. Born in Bucarest, she arrived in France in 1985, where she obtained political asylum, after having taken a five-year turn in Lisbon, at the invitation of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation ". *

Jean-Philippe Domecq – écrivain et critique d'art.

Already. Moreover, considering the years that she spent in London, at the invitation of the British Council, and the fact that at present, her life is divided between France and Germany, with long nomadic travels across Europe, and bearing in mind that she moved house 27 times and survived the experience, one might be justified to say that this person is rootless by profession.

After the great storm of 1999, when she started taking photographs of very old trees, one might have thought, not unjustifiably, that the constant, voluntary or involuntary, uprooting, which had defined the rhythm of her existence, had finally found the means for the recollection of memories. From 2003 onwards, the intention acquires precision. Photos – drawings- paintings – videos, of which the sole motif is an overturned stump; she had found it by chance during a walk in the woods that surround the Bavarian village where she lives half of the time. A fine, three meter high, perfectly upright wall, alive with the exposed roots and rootlets which crawl away, sprinkled with the velvety black of the soil from where they have been torn up; a lace which becomes more and more aired, as the seasons clear away that very soil. Its new destiny would have been to decay, to disintegrate, to end up in a fireplace, if not in a dumping ground.

And yet, like a planet orbiting itself, the stump goes on living. In its own way, it is weaving a new existence, in symbiosis with its environment. It is rooting once again. Thus, to observe it all these years, to try to understand it, to penetrate its secret; with the intention, precisely, of not having any, when facing the white sheet. Just to draw, to paint, to photograph over and over again this unique model with hardly perceptible changes, and letting in whatever wants to come. The stump, or rather its mental imprint, like an inverted Rorschach test, through a procuration-identification process, becomes the portrait of the artist.

More recently, she allows an increasing place to the analogical B&W photography and mixed media - a cross border research where the objectivity of the photography meets the subjectivity of drawing or painting.

Witness are the ensembles "Around a tree stump" 2006/2007/2008/2009 Once a year, in a single shooting séance, the camera lens always at the same level and taking a photo every three steps, she traces a complete circle around the stump. These lines of views - such the constituent elements of a hologram - are intended to restore the subject through the layering of their retinal residues in the eye of the spectator.

French Version

* Presentation in the book Un coin du monde. Ed. Isoète