A work contains something marvellous, when there is all the sky, all trees, all the water, all the shadow, all the light at the time it is painted: more than a portrait or a landscape, it is the work of a poet... Interior spaces, in which the artist shut herself to create, do not have to be forgotten during the contemplation of the work, because it would be appreciating the work without liking the artist.

These lines of Marcel Proust, written one century ago, remain an exact and permanent current event for whom wants to understand the work of an artist such as Elyane Addari. Years ago, it was said that she was author of "happiness painting". This impression is still right and is confirmed when observing paintings she presents at Lois Richards Galleries in New York this spring 2003. During the period of great landscape painters, of impressionists, the artist's happiness was the consideration of every day life's scenes, the representation of even most apparently banal places, the rural, maritime, forestry, fluvial or urban environment was then revealed and magnified.
Nobody does not too long linger looking at the wood edge, a sunken lane, a pond's bank, a plate of fruits. As written by Proust, to reveal the supernatural, these places and things must express their hidden radiance, their secret and virtual image, through the prism and the paintbrush of Pissarro, of Cezanne, Corot, Theodore Rousseau, Monticelli, of Dupré or Chintreuil…The artist is the only one person able to make emerge the hidden face of things, that, transcribed on the canvas, eternally shine.
Elyane Addari is one of these artists, she is the painter of silent life's scenes and things, of children and women in gardens and places, of the riviera's summers. She plays with the lights and palettes of bright, intense, euphoric colours, that make think of Paul Chabas, Sinibaldi, Renoir, of which she claims to draw, such as she claims to draw from Bonnard. Young women, girls, children, who, in colours wakes, are in paintings of Elyane Addari, seem to emerge from Francis Jammes poems, with these georgic incantations, with all little happiness of secret and quiet life of humble persons, characteristic of Jammes, that delighted Anna de Noailles. And what a science, what a mastery in composition!
These children and women in the lightly gardens provide us with a fresh air, such as a breeze, a breath, a relaxation, a deliverance, a beneficent submersion out of every day routine. But, is it not also the role and privilege of the artist to help us getting out the everyday life and to offer a break time to us thanks to the painting work?
This is probably because her culture, her imagination, her will, her state of mind enable her to see the happy side of things that Elyane Addari transcribes it in her canvas for our delight.

Marc Gaillard