Elsa-Louise Manceaux

Voice Notes is an installation that pushes the boundaries of painting by integrating speech, text, typography, the moving image, and sound. For over ten years, artist Elsa-Louise Manceaux has transformed painting from a strictly visual field into a media interface that engages in affective dialogues. In her practice, the history of traditional painting deviates toward other forms of use and communication styles. Her work interlaces intimate and emotional relationships—all mediated by chronological inconsistencies and, in voice notes, by vocal correspondence.

As the artist suggests in one of the aphorisms presented in the installation, written as part of her practice: “Medium, voix, interface… relation” are concepts that overlap and collapse for thirty minutes across the canvases presented at the Museo Jumex. Voice Notes addresses distance—physical, emotional, and conceptual—and time as pictorial principles, as conditions inherent to contemporary communication. Within the informative and the affective, the public and the private, the “online” and the “offline,” Manceaux asks: Can painting operate as a means of connection, as a form of social networking that exists within the vast trajectories of listening and memory? How does the history of our emotions get reflected on the surface of a painting?

–Museo Jumex