Chechu Álava & Rita Fischer, Plein air (2007).

In a new episode of our Cinema Room program, we would like to share with you a sparkling film filled with warmth, humor and sunlight. Plein air (2007) is a fruit of collaboration between two of our artists, Chechu Alava and Rita Fischer, who are also very good friends. They have known each other for a long time and even shared a common experience of what it is to be a young female artist in Paris in their 20s.
The film was initially conceived as a part of collaborative installation for a group show at Carré de Baudouin. The exhibition was called ‘Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité’ - a kind of a cliché if not a joke. As a worthy reply to such a challenge, the two painters decided not to take themselves too seriously. Rather, they wished to make something playful and lighthearted, something ironic, bringing amusement into the very idea of creation. Thus, they dressed up, putting their white dresses and their funny straw hats on. They took their easels, and brushes, and paints, and set off to the most bucolic of all places - to the forest of Fontainebleau.
The film is deeply ironic, picturing an idealized version of “la vie bohème”. At the same time, it revisits the codes of tradition and art history, giving a wink to the classical landscape painting with its habit of creating in plein air, and employs the elements of vocabulary of silent movies, notably the acceleration. Looking at these young girls, captured in the process of painting, one cannot but think of French landscape tradition, about Manet, and Monet, and Renoir… Although, here the paradigm is renewed and reversed. Indeed, those who used to be but models became painters, while those who painted them turned into models themselves - models to follow.