When studying Elsa Guillaume's work, it has always seemed to me that it was the result of the unlikely meeting of the Irish writer Jonathan Swift and the British author Lewis Carroll in the back room of an East End tavern, for she looks at the world through the eyes of both Gulliver and Alice. Although, in other respects, she might be enjoying playing the role of a scholar, curious about cartography, natural science, biology, and the discovery of yet unknown lands and creatures, following the example of the British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, or the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Unless, as a disciple of Xavier de Maistre, all this is simply a journey within a room successively turned into a drawing and sculpting studio, a flying carpet, a ship's hold, or even the stomach of a fish the size of a sea mammal. The most whimsical imagination hides behind a unique realism and the most tangible reality appears even more unbelievable than any kind of fiction. Inventing worlds, creating narratives, as well as shaping representations – that is, therefore, what constitutes the backbone of her work. But Elsa Guillaume's artwork stands out mostly because of its undeniable ability to generate small pieces of immediacy, which are as natural as they are disconcerting, samples of life, which are brighter and clearer than life itself, fragments of existence, whose truthfulness is as uncertain as it is undeniable. In 1981, on the occasion of the centenary of the creation of the character of Pinocchio, the Italian writer Italo Calvino, author of Invisible Cities among other works, declared: “We find it natural to think that Pinocchio has always existed, in fact one cannot imagine a world without Pinocchio.” One cannot imagine a world without Gulliver or Alice either... and today neither can we imagine one without Elsa Guillaume.

Nevertheless, the artistic worlds that she offers turn out to be infinitely more complex than Pinocchio's land of toys, for she only retains the appearance of the fable spirit on the surface, and appearances are always deceptive – as they should be. On the one hand, every line or shape, every drawing, sculpture or installation that she undertakes relishes in winding rather than unwinding the history of the self as well as the history of the world, the thirst for undertaking and hunger for discovery, the most wonderful dreams and the marvels of unknown and inconceived continents, in the manner of Rodéo Posidonie or Spineless Squid... No wonder, therefore, that we feel such delight in the idea of getting lost in her many adventures, of finally walking through the looking-glass with its mercurial fluidity, of letting ourselves be swallowed just like Jonah, so that we can be coughed up on some mysterious as well as magical shore in China, Japan, Brazil, Costa Rica, or even India. On the other hand, on closer examination, a harsher description of our reality soon appears in the threads of the narratives that she patiently weaves. For instance, Succulentes exposes petals of white flesh, almost as fragile as the porcelain they are made of, to the heat of the sun. By way of a cosmography of the body, Immergé imprisons us among stars and constellations. As for Gymnastique Lunaire, it is a true coral chrysalis which frees us as much as it enchains us. Not to mention Pinnules, Triple Oursinade, Cut Squid or Gobé, stalls of squeezed fruit, cut fish, ripped open sea creatures whose red and almost juicy flesh appears to be way more human than it is vegetable or animal. For, from Succulentes to Gobé and even Monticule and Manta Suit, could we not ourselves be those indolent filaments of meat, those voluptuous and lascivious segments of pulp, those hybridized flowers, fruit or fish, as sensual as they are lush, scattered, for example, in the territory of Antropocosmos Microphage ?

Elsa Guillaume thus brings us back to the unsettling experience of being, in the face of a world which is altogether familiar and strange, ordinary and magical, fascinating and disturbing, stimulating and threatening, the same way Gulliver, Alice or Pinocchio do. But it is not simply about transforming or interchanging the known with the unknown, the close with the distant, the tiny with the gigantic, the present with the future, but mostly about moving from hunter to prey, from desiring to being desired, from eating to being eaten, from civilized to savage, from master of the universe to subject of a comedy where the absurd competes with satire – a fair plot twist which destabilizes certainties and established beliefs. From then on her universe filled with tentacles becomes tentacular, her ink nets dense black threads, her thin and loose lines a lasso whose loops captivate us as much as they capture us. But if you are still itching for adventure, be careful about the colonies of siphonophores which, in their lifetime, deceive you with their shifting and moving shapes and their bright and luminescent colors. They know better than anyone how to use the facts to create a fiction which reveals the truth about things and the transience of life through no will of our own. Elsa Guillaume is their best ambassador.