10 Questions with Audrey Messas
Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine ISSUE12 | Featured Artist
Audrey Messas is a French-Israeli mixed media artist of Moroccan descent. She lives in Tel Aviv and works at an intersection of visual art and embodiment practices. Being an active eye surgeon, Audrey's art offers a unique perspective on the body. She channels the world as a whole living organism with its emotions and scars.
Her creations include photography, acrylic and oil paint, collages, and calligraphy. Her evolving work addresses more urgent collective issues, such as culture wars and ecological collapse.
From childhood onwards, Audrey was drawn to art to overcome overwhelm and othering. After her medical studies in Paris, Audrey studied abstract painting at the artist's house and Hakolel Studio for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, and Japanese calligraphy at the Mountain and River Zen Monastery in the Catskills (N.Y.). She has explored dances and consciousness in Europe, Israel, and the U.S.A. for the last 25 years.
In 2020 Audrey had her first solo exhibition titled "Permanent Change" in Tel Aviv, with 35 artworks presented.
In 2021 her Art Installation was part of a Dance Performance C.U.L.T.U.R.E. C.L.A.S.H. at ADA Studios in Berlin.
Audrey Messas - Portrait
ARTIST STATEMENT
Being a mixed media visual artist, an eye surgeon, and a multicultural mystic, Audrey Messas explores existential personal and collective questions. How are we “a” body? Are we fully alive? Or to be extinct? How are we present or numb to ourselves and our world? How are spirit and matter interlaced? How does stillness shape space with movement?
Audrey’s creative process anchors in awareness, in an intimate, moment-to-moment, subtle sensing of life. She uses photography, acrylic and oil paint, ink, and textiles. Following the emergence, she captures, glues, stitches, and mostly paints.
Embarking on a journey from the conditioned stream of thought, the shadows and dangers of our culture, Audrey touches ground in the immediate experience of herself. Her studio becomes a playground for colors and textures to appear on the canvas and reveal the world, the echo from the past, and the callings from the future. Audrey’s art evokes the most evolved vision of the world available and becomes an ephemeral incantation for our evolution.
Don't meet my eye, Photography, 113x151 cm, 2018 © Audrey Messas
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INTERVIEW
Please introduce yourself to our readers. Who is Audrey Messas?
I am a mixed media artist, using oil and acrylics, photography, collage, calligraphy, and fabrics in more 3D artworks.
I was born and raised in Strasbourg, France, by newly arrived Moroccan Jews. I moved to Paris to study medicine, and just before embarking on "a mainstream pre-formatted doctor's life," I immigrated again to Tel Aviv in search of a more creative, flexible, and dynamic environment. Here, I started exploring consciousness and dance, studied Japanese Calligraphy in the Zen Mountains and River Monastery in the Catskills, New York, and soon started painting at the Artist's House. Currently, I am part of a fascinating group of painters at the HaKolel Studio for contemporary art in Tel Aviv.
I am passionate about ART, truth, and reversing the slippery slope our civilization seems to be on, from self-termination to something more sustainable and intelligent. Despite this clarity, I am joyful and playful, in love with life, the people around me, and nature. I am always curious to go deeper, and I want to be present, open, authentic, and real!
To describe myself in 3 words, they would have to be verbs, so it allows for movement! I'd say SEEING, BEING, EXPRESSING.
Full stop at Ginza, acrylic on canvas, 100x70cm © Audrey Messas
Every day is a good day - dialogue, acrylic on canvas, 100x100 cm © Audrey Messas
Do you remember when you first realized you wanted to be an artist? And has anything changed in your mind since then?
I remember myself dancing, writing, and even dragging my siblings and friends to make art from a very young age. It was my favourite game! When I moved to Paris, I spent all my free time in museums and art book shops. I really engaged with making art as part of my Zen Buddhist Practice. That's when I started exploring Eastern wisdom. What really ignited me was Japanese Calligraphy. I would spend days at it, making my own ink, sitting and breathing, practicing, again and again, the same -but everchanging- ENSO. Each Enso would mirror exactly who I was at that moment, how free or tense I was, and this would help me to let go of all grasping for perfection!
Later on, while traveling to Asia, I explored photography and then started painting. Painting is my deepest calling, but photography is such a magic tool I cannot resist it.
When did I first realize "I am an artist"?—"That it's the deepest calling of my soul?" About one year ago, I remember clearly voicing to my partner on a morning walk at the beach that I had just had this insight. And a lot has changed in my mind since then! It was, for me, a turning point because I started to reorganize my life and priorities, like taking on a beautiful studio and making a lot of designated time for art every week.
Let's talk about your background. You are a French Israeli mixed media artist of Moroccan descent. Tell us more about this influence and how it is reflected in your work.
Yes, I am woven of multiple fabrics. My ancestors come from Spain and the Berber nomads in Morocco. I grew up in a small French town at the border with Germany, and now live and strive in effervescent Tel Aviv! I never feel like I totally belong in a group or that I have the keys to the ambient culture, but this keeps me open to the other's perspective and allows me to relate warmly with people from all origins, skin colors, and beliefs!
My Moroccan heritage is at the root of my love for the visual arts and my sensibility to color, curves, and textiles. Living in Tel Aviv is extremely stimulating; something is always brewing here, and just bathing in this energy makes me feel free and playful, and adventurous to push my own limits and rediscover my art every time I enter the studio. My French upbringing provides me with a cultural and aesthetic context and structure so that I paint in respect of what great artists have created before me and what is happening on the art scene in the world. Strangely enough, my strongest visual lineage comes from France.
The real challenge here is to "integrate and transcend". By this, I mean to pay my homage to the masters before me from all these cultures while feeling free, playful, and imaginative enough to innovate, take risks, and create with no strings attached within the moment!
Beyond gender and species © Audrey Messas
Moreover, you are an eye surgeon as well as an artist. How do you balance these two different words, and how do they influence each other?
You would be surprised by the similarity in these two Passions, but also by how these seeming opposites feed each other!
As an eye surgeon, I've spent many years working hard to achieve perfection in the very small gestures needed in microsurgery. Cutting through microns of thin membranes, it's about coordination and concentration, and this serves me in my artwork. Also, the eye is made of transparent tissues, and it takes practice to discern all the layers and details. That also comes in handy with photos and painting. I regularly take part in humanitarian missions where I get to live and work in remote parts of all continents. This has offered me the chance to immerse myself in other cultures, and it has shaped my sense of beauty and my understanding of materials.
Surgery and Painting are similar at another level because both are about stepping aside and letting the magic happen. Being 100% present and in service, but remembering it's not about you! In surgery, it's about the patient, and in Art, it's about what wants to be revealed. Also, surgery is all about being a step ahead and being in control, while in art, it's about surrendering and letting go of the attachment to the final result. If I am trying too hard, it becomes impossible to create! As an artist, I can be playful, silly, and messy. It's not exactly what you would expect from your surgeon, is it?
About Balance: For many years I had to give priority to my work as a surgeon and only took my camera out on humanitarian missions or on a journey to Asia. Recently, I have been actively making space and time for my art, and I move more fluidly between these two parts of my life. I love painting in the morning, going to the clinic in the afternoon, or coming to the studio after I finish my surgeries and getting messy, dirty, and smelly with oil paints. These two worlds are still too separated for the moment, but it is changing rapidly as my artwork has been shown in Israel and Europe.
What is your creative process like? Where do you get your inspiration from, and how do you translate it into your work?
It often starts with music and a little bit of dancing or cleaning the studio to ground myself. My inspiration can be a photo, a visual memory, or an emotion, sometimes something happening in the world. I will start with sketching or with a collage, but quickly enough, I'll move to acrylic. I sometimes make 2 or 3 paintings on the same theme until what really hooks me about it becomes more obvious, and then I will start with oil. Then it's a dialogue between me and the painting, looking, sensing, listening, adding, removing, trying, and playing. Usually, it will stop when I am too exhausted to continue. And sometimes, the day after, it seems it is finished, or I can go back to it.
With photography, it's a very similar process. I will find myself attracted to a scene, and I will stay there sometimes for hours, changing angle and aperture, taking a big number of shots refining my take until I get the shot that translates into an image the precise, subtle content I was looking for.
Despite the fact that I see my artwork in relation to the world and culture we live in, my inspiration rarely starts with a mental object; it is usually very poetic: a posture, a texture, an emotion. I never know in advance what that piece is going to be about finally.
The creative process is guiding itself and revealing itself in an emergent fashion. The studio is a playground. It is mostly about listening and staying out of the way of what wants to manifest. I love being very surprised by the final result!
What theme do you pursue, and what message do you want to convey?
I have been obsessed with truth and transparency my whole life. Having felt different and othered almost everywhere, I have a radar for BS and the lies of our society. The elephant in the room is on the front scene for me, and my job is to make it alive for anyone who wants to see it. I don't paint the elephant or illustrate it; I just paint or follow the colors and textures, but maybe I channel it, and my resonance becomes visual art.
The themes are our disconnection from our body, the toxicity of our civilization, the illusion of separation between people by beliefs, preferences, or worse, borders, and our dangerous numbness to animals and plants. In general, my fear is that technology has grown too fast for our compassion and consciousness.
So my message would be: WAKE UP! And the rest is up to each of us. I don't have a solution or a recipe; making art brings me joy and energy. I make art to meet myself and life, and invite my viewers to do the same. My photos and paintings are an opportunity for an authentic encounter with whomever and however we are in the world at this precise moment.
Hope on Mount Kenya, acrylic on canvas, 130x150 cm © Audrey Messas
Is there any artist you particularly look up to?
So many! From Fra Angelico to Georgia O'Keefe, Helen Frankenthaler, and De Kooning, but I especially learn a lot from the work of Matisse.
If I had to choose only one artist, it would be Katsushika Hokusai. He was such a pioneer that he had to change his name and town many times during his life. I am in awe of the freedom of his brushstrokes and his revolutionary use of color. His paintings are so alive that I feel transported in space and time while looking at them. The story says that when summoned to paint for a Shogun, he created a huge blue line with buckets and brooms, and dipped the feet of a chicken in red ink to chase him across the picture. Calling it—' Autumn leaves on the river'.
A living artist that I look up to is the Israeli contemporary dancer and choreographer Ohad Naharin. He developed "Gaga", a unique language of dance that is now taught all over the world. It's about floating or falling upward or wrapping your muscles around your bones. It is an update to the classical ballet "plie" et "rond de jambe". Gaga brings joy and consciousness to the body in movement. For me, this is art and activism for the planet together.
You work with several different materials and techniques. How do you choose them, and what impact do they have on the final product?
Yes, I paint, work with papers, fabrics, tear and glue my photos, and even play with bigger pieces like mannequins.
Each material is related to a part of me. For example, wools, threads, and textiles are echoes from my Berber ancestors, and rice paper for having practiced Zen calligraphy for many years. Sometimes I use materials from the operating room, like disposable sterile drapes. Whenever I see a material that inspires me, I keep it. I have a treasure box, where stuff sits patiently, waiting for its moment.
I usually start working with one material, and then the creative process takes me from one to another. For example, I could be looking at a specific series of my photographs, print many copies on various media, and start a collage. If I feel it calls for texture, I will then start painting or adding a medium or go to the garden and bring some soil. Sometimes I will start painting and feel it needs motility; then, I will sew threads to the canvas or turn it into 3D by hanging pieces of cloth holding other paintings. It sometimes radically changes the spatial arrangement. This can introduce the effect of gravity or wind. It can also make a piece ephemeral, like when I bring pieces together with bandages knowing ahead that it will deteriorate with time.
The materials have a very visible and significant impact on the final product. They will impact the way a message is conveyed or even modify the whole vibration of an artwork from dramatic to funny or the opposite. In the end, the materials are a way to stay physically and in relation to my environment.
Longing for a golden fish © Audrey Messas
Energetic MRI, acrylic on canvas, 100x150 cm © Audrey Messas
What advice would you give to someone who, like you, wants to start a side career as an artist?
1. Immersion: go to art shows and galleries, read, and meet artists.
2. Community: cultivate artistic friendships and, if possible, join a shared creative space where you can paint or do your thing together with other artists from time to time. It is inspiring; it invites feedback and keeps our ego in place.
3. Make time for your art. I have it on my calendar!
4. Make space. For your materials and inspirational objects, a place to leave works in progress, a place to just go, dream and imagine.
5. Finally, commit to your art 100%, but keep it fun, and don't take yourself too seriously.
Lastly, where do you see yourself and your art 5 years from now?
I see myself in my studio every day! I want time to engage in long-term projects. So many things inspire me! I am not sure, but I think I will paint mostly. I would also love to start cooperation with other artists. I am fascinated by art from all over the world. I can't wait to explore with others, mix our techniques and cultures, deconstruct differences, and rebuild joyfully.
Of course, I would love to get exposure, but I am not going to worry about that.
I trust life, and I will keep making my art passionately. As I stay open and relational, I believe my art will evolve to where it can shed light and beauty on and in our world.
