Danielle Aspis has chosen to document life through a playful theatricality, transforming the spaces of production, creation and reception into places of aesthetic research, delimited by digital modalities. His space of production is life, and everything can be a pretext for innovative thinking that materializes either in the form of writing or in the form of original artistic works. His creative space is his mental space, influenced by his theoretical and artistic culture. Her reception space is the gallery, social networks and her website.

Her influences are rich and varied; from primary school onwards she has participated in a programme that offers students a visit to a museum once a week. Then, as a teenager, she attended theatrical performances directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, and on her return from her study trip to Jerusalem, she became a stage photographer, photographing the productions of Daniel Mesguish (among others). She also became interested in Peter Brook, attending his performances and reading his writings. Her research on colour comes from her encounter with abstract art; she is particularly fond of the works of Karel Appel and Jackson Pollock. She also considers humanist photography as one of the most important productions of the 20th century, while analysing its historical and theoretical aspects, and going beyond, in her personal work, the problematic and paradigm of “it has been”.

So there is a paradox: this does not mean that she completely refutes the photographic technique that produces the “it has been”, but she goes beyond this approach by a serial experimental and exploratory work on the formal and chromatic variations made possible by digital software. This leads to dematerialized, abstract or fictional images, against the usual commercial practices, in order to bring to life an imaginary world shaped by her rich research and experience around Photographic Art and Contemporary Art.

His work has thus been oriented, during the confinement, towards Digital Art, which has opened up new, unsuspected and almost magical territories where classical discourses can be reconsidered from new angles. Theatricality, precisely, where space becomes more important than historical temporality, as if, with the digital, we had passed from a logic of historical temporality to a logic of spatiality. Spatiality that is often virtual, where modalities define limits that generate productions. Digital modalities allow, through technology, notably Photoshop, to tend towards a poetisation of space and to propose an embellishment associated with a dialogue on the stakes of today’s Art. This also raises the question of survival through an Art that wants to be singular to propose an optimistic vision in perseverance and Altruism.

Art is a playground that embellishes the world or deconstructs it: Danielle Aspis has chosen embellishment. As a digital artist, she composes with the abstract and the fictional, using the extended functionalities of Photoshop software. Her research opens up unsuspected territories through which she documents life with a playful theatricality.

Danielle Aspis has also been a photographer for over 30 years. She began her career by making theatre reports, then her work turned towards studio work (portraits and objects), and events. At the same time, she pursued her plastic and artistic research by exhibiting her personal work (Paris, Ile de France, Vichy) and broadened her theoretical and historical knowledge through university studies. It is through this path that she builds her theory of action, by approaching the image through theatricality where the space of play is declined in three spaces: the space of production, the space of creation and the space of exhibition. These are transformed into places of aesthetic research, delimited by artistic modalities.

Danielle Aspis holds a Master’s degree in Science and Technology (1995) and a DEA in Aesthetics (1998) from Paris VIII, a PhD in History and Civilization from EHESS (2014) and a DU in Suicidology from the University of Paris Descartes (2019). She has studied all aspects of photographic practice, from artistic practices to commercial practices, including scientific photography for her thesis. With this academic and field background, she is focusing during confinement on new steps in her work by creating Digital Art.

Suicide attempters, her father was a photographer and her sister a journalist, and it is also in the affect that she drew her resources, like a constantly renewed homage, where action takes precedence over melancholy. Thus, her research in Suicidology, at the end of which she wrote two documented articles, enabled her to open up to a social problem of public health, by co-creating, with Simon Aspis, her brother, the Esther-Lumière association (https://www.esther-lumière.com). She invests differently in her relationship with others, by advocating an art therapy approach for people suffering from suicidal thoughts or pathologies.

Aware of the challenges of Art today, Danielle Aspis seeks to renew thought and creation through committed works that ask the question of survival through Art. Survival in the face of crises that aggravate our distress, but which can only be overcome by dynamic action combining optimism and perseverance.