Elia­ne Bey­tri­son

It was while working together on an artistic project relating to coma that this exhibition by Eliane Beytrison was born. Starting from the phrase of a caregiver comparing the comatose body to a luxuriant island whose room would be an ocean, the visual artist develops a personal and poetic vision of the island, both a geographical place in the middle of the void and a mysterious space charged with fantasy. What can be an evocation of paradise lost, of a place outside real space, is also an evocation of exile or banishment. Thus, the island is not only the representation of an ideal and desired abstraction - such as Watteau's Cythera - but can also take on a more prosaic reality, that of places of deportations or internments, whether political , prison or psychiatric. For Eliane Beytrison, this double perception of the island is a point of connection between her artistic research around coma and her investment with Palestinian artists from the Gaza Strip. If the coma is seen as an unknown land, whose lushness and plant abundance can be compared to the commensal flora developing on the "floating" body of the comatose person, the events in Gaza transform this narrow, overpopulated coastline into an archipelago surrounded by hostility - an element surrounded by an element of another nature - whose luxuriance is embodied by the multitude of lives that inhabit it. Furthermore, the island or the archipelago are also evocations of our intimacies in the face of the natural or historical events to which we are subjected. Born in Sion, living and working in Florence, Eliane Beytrison studied at the Ecole Cantonale des Beaux-Arts in Sion, as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. Training in the restoration of paintings and works on paper completes his curriculum. She has exhibited both in Switzerland and abroad - Italy and the Middle East - and collaborated on several shows. Eliane Beytrison has also organized numerous exhibitions of Palestinian artists, including Palestine, in 2008 at the Manoir de Martigny.