NoguerasBlanchard is pleased to announce F R A N C E, a solo exhibition of new drawings by Annelise Coste (Marseille, 1973). The exhibition is centered around a large wall-drawing painted with an airbrush directly on to the gallery walls, large-format airbrush paintings and a series of A4 drawings on paper.

Through the lense of her imagination, Coste creates a fantasy world in which she draws portraits of reality based on her own idiosyncratic codes. Her series of A4 drawings, installed in this exhibition in a straight line across a wall, read like a novel or a diary; on each page Coste mixes her feelings and emotions with anti-authoritarian political slogans and social commentaries. Her drawings are a portrait of the world as well as an expression of her mental and emotional state: the world and I. Through the appropiation of iconographic elements from popular culture, such as Mickey Mouse or the Evian logo, and the use of language, Coste´s sprayed messages constantly shift focus from figures of speech to visual idiom, from text to form, from form to the meaning generated by the text´s content. Her commentaries on realpolitik and the everyday describe a discontent with culture and society and fluctuate between idealism, irony and despair.

The technique of drawing is essential to the process of creation of all Coste´s works. The frenetic and spontaneous quality of the airbrush sprayed across the gallery walls recalls the graphic violence of graffiti art. Coste deliberatley refuses to adopt llinguistic and artistic conventions and she appropiates the gallery space in the same way graffiti does with the public space, while she recycles this reactionary imagery to infuse it with her personal, romantic and poetic sensibility.

For the exhibition title, Coste deconstructs the word F R A N C E, showing an emotional and personal approach to the ideological conditions of her country of origin. The drawing which bears the same title appears to be a deformed Gallic cock, the national symbol of France, where the three colours red, white and blue are the only iconic reference. Throughout the exhibition, this tri-colour scheme reveals the artists joys and fears, she exposes herself and creates an inventory of the anxieties and neuroses that we all have in common, though they often remain dormant under the covers of rationalism and the endless events that monopolize modern life.

Annelise Coste has exhibited in the following group shows: Midnight Walkers, Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland (2006); The youth of today, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2006); Global World/ Private Universe, Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland; The Collective Unconscious, Migros Museum, Zurich (2002); Urban Diaries: Young Swiss Art, Alcalá 31, Madrid (2003). She will be showing her work in April in Le Centre Culturel Suisse de Paris. Annelise Coste lives and works in Zurich.