Her monotype series is a back-and-forth between multiple, intertwining levels calling back to one another. It is also about departures, casting off, leaving the land for distant borders. About taking everything with us, like Noah did on his Ark: the world and the city, creatures and objects, shapes and figures; a floating Babel in the manner of Fellini’s “E la nave va”. And the creatures that haunt these places a spectral as ghost ships, keep throwing their nets and putting up their scaffoldings, in order to take hold or keep hold. Thus, we are simultaneously here and elsewhere, on our way to the beyond and immersed in the depths of reality and time.

But the main characteristic in this new series is the energy, the intensity and impetus invested in and through her work. Upon closer examination the fluidity and transparency of water are also those if the ink which Sefolosha’s spills at the dawn, at the beginning of each drawing. And the power and force of the tide are those her lines, where each form and figure emerge from a wave of colour, a wave of which they sometimes preserve the delicate, foamy fringes. She sails her fiery, spirited expressionism as a captain sails his ship, bringing her works to their culmination, to the point of balance where each form and object become sovereign, full and clear solving at once the mystery of appearances and the truth of situations, and focussing in one single point the intensity of life and the fragments of time.

It is no coincidence if she chose to monotype technique, a unique procedure whose unpredictable, adventurous nature brings unexpected surprises. For instance, when the print of the press duplicates the pier’s guardrail.

Thus, the production of each piece is an inner journey where everything is at stake at each stage, at each stopover. Things arrive on rise; others go away, stray off and then come back, the same or different; others board unexpectedly, upping sticks and leaving. There are teeming multitudes, rustling and colourful, made along the docks or bridges, Crowds of colliding eras, genres and registers. The obverse of time, the hidden side of the iceberg of our world, ships of wise or ships of fools inhabiting forever the artist’s work, intermingling experienced or imagined stories, drawn from reality or dreams, Distant echoes of Hieronymus Bosch, especially of the small paintings in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, entitled “The Concert in the Egg”.

They could also seem unfathomable mysteries, yet they are also bright symbols. The magic at work in the artist is an allegory, if not a prophecy; in any case, it suggests new directions. And those embarking on Christine Sefolosha’s ships, on their way to their own destiny, are of course the heroes of the world which she has patiently and meticulously summoned or created, year after year; the pantheon, the bestiary, the herbarium: in other words, the encyclopaedia of her own universe, which she carries along on her journey. Edith Carey pointed it out more than ten years ago: the world of Christine Sefolosha “is not born of her imagination, it emerges from the depths of the mysterious underworld which she carries inside of her, and of which she becomes aware through the creative act, although chance also plays a determining role”. And what the artist previously said to Yves Korby about her birds could equally well describe her ships today: “They attract me particularly because they speak of elsewhere, of departures, of freedom. (…) They symbolize what we long for, and what holds us back.”

Thus, almost for the first time, Christine Sefolosha’s inner world and her creation board on the same ghost ship. Her thought, her mind, her soul, her knowledge, and everything she has done for over twenty years, she puts it on water, on a single nutshell that takes the size of a steamer. She takes it all far away, with her usual curiosity attention and determination, toward new challenges and new continents. Whereas her characters, especially the animals, were usually drawn sideways, the passengers of her ghost ships face us, almost with a questioning look: “Come along!”, “Join us!”, they seem to say. “Anything can happen, anything goes here in the painting!”

And on those ships of whimsicality and fantasy, reality and dreams, the only captain is no other, of course, than the artist herself, the great instructor of the visible and the invisible, of what is in the air and what is in the depths.

Did you say mysteries, fantasy, ghosts? It is rather the unconscious calling back to our consciousness, our dreams and desires calling back to our reason. The instinctive boldness, immense ambition, inner necessity, the unfailing will, the impulses at work in the artist – as in many others – are too interwoven to be sorted out. Never mind! Christine Sefolosha, strangely peaceful and serene, seems to be guided only by her own evidence, by her own star. Heading north! The holds of her boat-worlds are full, and she now mastered her art with confidence and the unmatched pleasure of the creative act.

Where will they dock, which countries will they (or we) discover? A promised land? A last refuge? An arrival or a departure? Only her future work will tell, but we can bet that the smooth, radiant appeal of the works that we see today anticipates equally glittering gems in the future. Right now, she is certainly extracting them from their shell as a diver in the deepest oceans.

Preface — Charles-Arthur Boyer