Heidi Taillefer’s work is an original creative fusion of classical figurative painting, surrealism, contemporary realism, and mythology combined with popular figurative traditions ranging from Victorian romanticism to science fiction. It is consonant with some of the early 20th century surrealists such as Max Ernst and Giorgio DeChirico. Taillefer painstakingly paints subjects comprised of precise, seemingly incongruous objects characterized as symbolic, forming a complex composite of various elements and adds a contemporary spin to often classical icons. Depicting mechanized subjects placed in natural settings, her work has acts as a nostalgic embrace of the past, as seen through the lens of a culture racing forward at high speed, fitted with massive technological advancement.
While using a language of mechanistic imagery, she address eternal issues on the human condition borrowing from mythologies throughout different eras and cultures. Taillefer’s work is an attempt to combine subjective philosophical experience with the more absolute and calculable elements espoused by traditional science, merging biology with engineering through a discrete assembly of concrete elements. She uses mechanism as a language, mirroring the ubiquity of technology in the world, in an effort to marry primordial human essence with the explosive expansion of the “machine”.
Her website: http://www.heiditaillefer.com/
