I’m interested in portraying human emotions. I want to reveal them in an intimate, poetic way. I invoke my truth through imagination and mystery. My paintings are composed of different juxtaposed elements. I use all kinds of sources. Together, they create a visual representation of the emotions I feel.
Tell us a bit about yourself :
I’m a 38-year-old French figurative painter who has lived in Berlin since 2015. I have a master’s degree in visual arts from Montpellier, France.
How long have you been a painter?
I didn’t know how to paint before 2016 but I was inspired by a friend who gave me her old tubes of paint that she didn’t want to use any more. I started painting on my own in my apartment in Berlin in 2016 and had my first exhibition in 2017.
What are your themes?
At the beginning of my career, I was very influenced by feminist themes. I did an exhibition with 50 artists in Berlin-Neukölln where I showed my first feminist works. Today, I focus more on mental health, personal mythology and identity. Research into identity is a subject I think about a lot. I was born in France, my father moved to France from Laos in his early teens and my mother is French.
What cause or charity do you support?
I am the godmother of a 13-year-old Laotian girl through a French association called Enfants du Mékong. This association looks after the education of disadvantaged children through school sponsorship.
Who are your influences?
Claude Cahun! She was a visionary and played a lot with genres. Her themes were very close to mine, like How do we represent ourselves?
Tursic et Mille.I’m simply in love with them. . Their work is crazy, colourful, abstract and figurative. I love the way they mix eras.
Autoportrait, 70×100 cm, oil on canvas, 2023 © Alice Rajasombat
Self-portrait is part of a personal search for identity. My aim was to reveal myself, taking into account the impact of my mental health. I tried to paint myself as I see myself. I pull on my face to show that it is not frozen. It doesn’t belong to the family of portraits that you would commission a painter to paint and express pride and beauty. Here it’s a question of lifting the veil on the outside connected to the inside. It’s not perfect, and we’re not trying to make it look that way either.
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