Crystel Ceresa - Biography

Crystel Ceresa's large works attract at first glance with their decorative and skilfully painted surfaces – it is only later that they reveal their deep connections to art history. Crystel Ceresa creates her subtle airbrush paintings with bold pastels, here and there the motifs are plunged in a hazy fog. Her subjects are flowers, spread out like jewels; portraits of her personal heroes or text fragments that Ceresa assembles to blurry, collage-like compositions.

 

Crystel Ceresa's works have an aura of intimacy. With her style the Swiss artist does not strive to express an objective depiction of the real world; her works are rather about the visual interpretation of the artist's imagination, sources of inspiration and memories. The compositions are suggestive of fragile remembrances that can pale, fade and disappear any time.

 

Crystel Ceresa's compositions are suggestive of fragile remembrances that can pale, fade and disappear any time

With their decorative look the images evoke a kitsch aesthetic, yet the gold backgrounds, skulls, repainted surfaces and flower-framed portraits point towards different art historical styles, such as Byzantine icon painting, baroque vanitas depictions, the white powdered portraits of the rococo and the idealized female figures of the Pre-Raphaelites.

 

Crystel Ceresa was born in Switzerland in 1977. She graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva in 2004 and from the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Geneva in 1998. She works and lives in Geneva until today.

Crystel Ceresa - collections

The artist has often exhibited her works in Switzerland, and also in Denmark in 2008. Her works are part of several private and business collections, such as the Academisch Medisch Centrum, Amsterdam, Bank Julius Bär, Basel, Crédit Suisse, Zurich, Zurich Versicherungen, Basel, HSBC, Zurich, Sammlung Yves Racloz, Geneva and Sammlung Nicolas Torroni, Geneva.

 

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