It is about thirty works, mainly paintings, and drawings with blood on the theme of fauns, faunessess, and their history that have crossed the work of the artist for more than ten years. The exhibition is therefore intended to be a journey, an exploration of the pictorial world, so singular of Brigitte Aubignac whose development is articulated in successive moments, in sequences, which never constitute breaks but only passages as the work as a whole retains its homogeneous character.

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For all these years, there have been the Fauns, born in 2006, whose existence she subsequently declined – without making it an exclusivity - in the series of Boys, Portraits, then in Insomnies and Make-ups and Fauns quite simply, in their own unique lives.  They inhabit the forest, at their origin and then recently the city, they are the soul of a work recounted, current, far from a historical mythology but on the contrary paradigms of an eternal reality. This painting, rare in the artistic landscape of today, is imposed by its poetic character and eminently sensitivity that metaphorically addresses the theme of difference, variety of bodies, and metamorphosis in a series of paintings that are sometimes extremely joyful, or on the contrary deeply nostalgic in which always emerges the feeling of life.  
 

Who are these faunas that Brigitte Aubignac paints with almost obsessive constancy for so long? Certainly, mythical creatures whose history dates back to ancient Greek and Roman legends, but also the mysterious actors of an epic that reverberates its echo in a present where they creep on the margins of our world. These demigods of ancient times, symbols of pleasure and country life, are propelled into a today that, despite their carelessness, may seem hostile and disturbing to them. The stigmata of their animality exclude them from normality to which they seem to aspire; their ears, their fur, and their goat feet are hardly masked by clothes that trivialize them. Would they become human? This mutation interests the artist who sees the half-man/half-animal state as the symbol of a primitive evolution that links man to the nature from which he came. His message is supported by an ability to create a painting of both landscape and characters in which subject and color complement each other in a harmony where «the tone of the whole is at the service of poetic and pictorial creation».
 

The first works that depict faunas appear in the work of Brigitte Aubignac at the end of 2006, initially in the form of small canvases following the intimist paintings of the previous series "Portraits Anonymous" and "Les Garçons". These fantastic creatures are depicted in banal and everyday situations that suggest an anecdote (Deux faunes sous la lune, 2006, À l'orée du bois, 2006) or translate a feeling (L'Embarras, 2006), they are surprised in their reflection, in conversation, or even in their play.  Their childlike, carefree, and playful nature is expressed in a series of bucolic paintings in which the woods and forests still conceal the secret of these mutant beings that symbolize “the state of nature,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau. before the establishment of the social state. 

 

Very quickly, starting in 2008, painting was imposed in monumental formats. Two masterpieces occupy an important part of the exhibition, Les Troublions and Le Dimanche des Faunes. The faunas need air and space, The Troublions have fun, sing, and play music, one of them draws a sneering smile, the scene is joyful, It is a shared feast and in the distance, an observer watches these celebrations in peaceful countryside. The composition of the work focuses on this moment of pleasure, accentuating the impression of carelessness of these mischievous beings who seem to defy reason, while the artist sketches a landscape that fades into a distant perspective. 

 

In Les Troublions the human imprint is still not visible, it becomes more evident in Le Dimanche des Faunes. The temptation of civilization is more marked. The faunas, driven by their instinctive curiosity, approach the city that we can only imagine, but which already marks with its imprint the shores of an omnipresent landscape, soiled by the debris of a landfill that these little monsters explore, in search of some remains that they take and dress. In this group of mutant beings, the transformations are affirmed, their animal characteristics fade, and the temptation to normality becomes more evident, one puts on pants, the other tries a shoe, and the fauns put on a skirt and evaluate the effect produced. The scene suggests the eternity of a shared moment that Brigitte Aubignac grasps like a fable that is only the mirror of a sensible and well-current reality. The painter also wants to be the heir of a pictorial classicism whereby the landscape is not only a decor, but also testifies to the relationships between beings and nature in a chromatism, while retaining soothing green and yellow earth and sun.