Elise Toïde
Paris


Elise Toïde captures moments of intimate stillness in the restless chaos of events.

Her gaze seems to escape conventional situations, finding the beautiful introspection of suspended times.

Elise's images are memories of ephemeral feelings translated into a visual language: dramatic, poetic, delicate words on photographic film. She patiently waits, like a thinker who silently watches the flow of thoughts in searching of an idea, until something like an epiphany breaks through the situation revealing the shade of an hidden emotion. The soul of the subject is now vulnerable to her lens, which glimpses into this private dimension catching its secrets.

Her images immortalize small details which otherwise would have been unnoticed, like in paintings. Indeed, Elise's passion for drawing with charcoals gave birth to the contrasts and grains of her photography, while the graphic shapes are rooted in her studies of architecture.

As an artist, she is completely plunged into reality, she is not interested in building a parallel imaginary world through her pictures, yet a part of her is floating, as it was not belonging to this universe and right for this reason it owns the possibility of portraying it. This attraction for emptiness, which conceptually reminds of Edward Hopper's art, may be liked to her childhood spent in the open landscapes of South of France.

Although her images are mainly shot in crowded big cities, she seems to long for a certain softness in the roughness of the frames. Photography is indissoluble to Elise's personality as it is her own way to possess reality according to her discrete presence, looking at the accidents of contemporary life in a deeper and highly personal way.
(Text: Cecilia Musmeci, LE PARADOX)




(Selected Projects)