Research, experimentations and explorations are Johanna Vaude’s artistic and aesthetic path. Part of the new generation of experimental cinema, she has developed her sensitivity through painting, drawing, photography, poetry, video and installations. When she started her plastic arts studies, she discovered experimental cinema and it immediately seduced her. It was what she was looking for to explore and transcribe, by plastic hybridization (mixes of paintings made on the film; argentic, video and DV mediums), her trips and her sensorial experiences (Autoportrait & le monde (Self-portrait & the world), [1997]).

Johanna Vaude’s first film to be created outside university,(L’oeil sauvage (The wild eye), [1998]), was noticed by Nicole Brenez who showed it at the Cinémathèque Française. From then on, Johanna’s works have been acknowledged thanks to the first price of avant garde films in 2000, awarded by Maurice Lemaître; to seasons such as the “Jeune, dure et pure!” festival at the Cinemathèque Française or the “Côté Court” festival in Pantin. Since, her films have been shown in many different places, like in Italy during the festival of Pesaro that acknowledeged her whole artistic work (see heading Lieux de projection). Her films are regularly studied by students and scholars. At the moment, her films are a musical and visual representation of all her questions about our aesthetical questionnings as much as about our social or dreamed worlds…(L’oeil sauvage (the wild eye), [1998]; I’ve got the power!, [2002]). When the artist chooses her subject, her thought or her vision, goes into it, develops and dissects it and in a second time synthesizes and condenses it, she forces the means she uses to follow, to obey her desire to create (Samouraï, [2002]).

In her works, we find her freedom of thought, her love for human beings and in the heart of these things, the viewer discovers her extraordinary ability to make choices and her incomparable strengh and desire to create (Notre Icare (Our Icare), [2001]; Tryptique : she’s gone away, [2001])

Thanks to hybridization, Johanna Vaude develops a technical and plastical language that is able to fit the need for space, synthesis and poetry her works require (Totalité -Remix-, [2005]). They evolve following her look on things, her conscience – which reacts to modern life, to her past as much as to her future – of which a few parts are sometimes revealed. However, even if she freely uses this language in her works to “open the eye” of the viewer, she knows that her work still hasn’t blossomed out completely. What kind of life is metamorphosing inside the chrysalis? To keep giving her works more amplitude, to explore and experiment further still, Johanna now writes the score for her films (Exploration, [2005]). It is yet another asset to which poetry may be added…Her artistic and aesthetic world is bearing the signs of these “free-thinking” artists, who, all their lives, follow a quest of which their works are the best testimonies.

Pierrick Moulins

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