“My paintings are mental landscapes, whose forms can evoke the curves of a body as well as anonymous geometric figures. The forms, drawn beforehand in pencil on thecanvas, remain ambiguous. The interweaving of all these abstract forms takes the direction of a certain figuration which wants to be fleeting, so that it becomes difficult to name it. »Based on the principle of pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon similar to optical illusion, the motifs in Jessica Russ's paintings generate a myriad of associations of ideas in the viewer, always on the lookout to recognize a figure. familiar. This is somehow akin to "devilries" according to the artist, hence a certain malice that emanates from her compositions. Similarly, the titles of the works, which are not very descriptive, lead us to multiple interpretations. "My paintings are moods," says Jessica Russ. At the limit of abstraction and figuration. I like to see what happens in this ambiguity. The elements taken separately tend towards abstraction, but the whole must tend towards a world. It is the person who looks at the painting who finishes it!”
Like Matisse's paper cut-outs, the contours of the coloured areas are sharp and clean. Acrylic painting, which excludes any form of repentance, involves meticulous and rigorous execution. The arrangements are like so many fragments delimited by contrasting colours or crossed by organic lines. "The radical superimposition of lines on flat areas of colour puts the drawing back in the foreground and frees the gesture. For me, drawing with a brush is a way of bringing movement into compositions that evoke immobility and suspended time.The flatness is not devoid of complexity, since the surfaces play with the horizon and the lines interlock, merge and intersect in a constant dialogue between tension and harmony. "These lines make their way incongruously, hesitating between the marked paths traced by the meeting of flat surfaces and the exploration of unknown terrain.