{"id":117437,"date":"2025-11-04T13:17:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T13:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/117437\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T13:17:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T13:17:24","slug":"elise-perois-woven-paintings-are-a-transcendent-take-on-tapestry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/117437\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00c9lise Peroi\u2019s Woven Paintings Are a Transcendent Take on Tapestry"},"content":{"rendered":"

I stumbled just before reaching the door of \u00c9lise Peroi<\/a>\u2019s home and studio in Arles, France. While the steep medieval stairs were partly to blame, I had been distracted, thinking about Peroi\u2019s translucent, pastel-hued weavings, which I first encountered two years earlier. Suspended within window-like frames reminiscent of looms, her silk works open up ethereal spaces evoking ancestral tapestries, yet speak a diaphanous contemporary language entirely their own.<\/p>\n

Before settling in Arles, Peroi studied textile design at the Acad\u00e9mie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where she earned her MFA in 2015. At the end of her studies, she received the Prize of Excellence from the City of Brussels, which led to institutional projects and residencies all over the world. Today, her work continues to subtly evolve as projects and accolades accumulate. On November 19th, Peroi will receive the Pierre Cardin Prize in sculpture. Last spring, she had her first solo exhibition in New York, \u201cFor Thirsting Flowers<\/a>,\u201d with Carvalho<\/a>. In 2026, the gallery will also present her work in a solo booth at Frieze Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to do everything I could to keep weaving, and my work eventually found its voice in the contemporary art field,\u201d said Peroi, reflecting on her education. She felt drawn to painting and pigments, intertwining images\u2014such as illuminated manuscripts\u2014with textiles. \u201cIt took the form of installations, with a focus on frames and how the viewer moves around them.\u201d <\/p>\n

Peroi\u2019s process is rooted in the hand-weaving and repetition of ancestral techniques, into which she braids her own reflections on landscape, gesture, architecture, and breath. \u201cI can only work on one composition at a time, and it can take me anywhere from a week to three months,\u201d she noted. After an initial phase of research and drawing\u2014often sparked by a resonant philosophical or poetic sentence\u2014she begins weaving, which can be a cathartic process.<\/p>\n

\"Elise\"Elise<\/p>\n

Early on in her practice, weaving had a psychoanalytic dimension. \u201cIt was difficult, though not in a negative way. It was about letting things come out of the body,\u201d she explained. But her relationship to the loom has since evolved. \u201cIt\u2019s not meditative, exactly, but it calms me,\u201d she says. \u201cI reconnected the warp threads just before you arrived,\u201d Peroi told me, almost as a confession. \u201cIt gave me a sense of relief.\u201d She exhaled visibly to show what she meant. It\u2019s as if the loom catches her in the midst of the leap of faith that creating a piece requires. \u201cWhen I start weaving, I feel like I\u2019m moving forward. I see something taking shape.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the work progresses, Peroi paints abstract and nature-inspired motifs directly onto the silk. She then cuts into the painted surfaces and reweaves selected fragments, leaving others open. The tapestries are mounted onto wooden, rectangular structures or frames, usually in pairs. <\/p>\n

Diamond-shaped openings appear at the sides, echoing the rhythmic openings and closings of the silk weft interlacing with the linen warp. Peroi installs these weavings so that our gaze travels through up to four layers\u2014such as in the large installation Vestige des plantes absentes (2025), currently on view in the group show \u201cThe Rose That Grew From Concrete\u201d at the Museo di Sant\u2019Orsola in Florence. <\/p>\n

Her works feel at once painterly and architectural: sculptures where threads and images float are held in soft tension. They seem to breathe, pulling us in like a gentle draft\u2014not unlike the voile curtain I saw billowing softly in the sunny breeze at her studio window.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00c9lise Peroi, installation view of \u201cThe Rose That Grew From Concrete\u201d at the Museo di Sant\u2019Orsola, Florence, Italy, 2025. Photo by Claudio Ripalti. Courtesy of the artist and CARVALHO.<\/p>\n

\u00c9lise Peroi, installation view of \u201cThe Rose That Grew From Concrete\u201d at the Museo di Sant\u2019Orsola, Florence, Italy, 2025. Photo by Claudio Ripalti. Courtesy of the artist and CARVALHO.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have much of a background in painting or the visual arts,\u201d Peroi admitted, \u201cbut there are two important figures in my family. The first is my mother, who\u2019s a highly skilled seamstress. The other is my grandmother, on my father\u2019s side, who was an illuminator and calligrapher. She worked on the Kalendrier des Bergiers, a medieval calendar printed from engraved wood.\u201d <\/p>\n

As a child, Peroi spent hours among the sewing machines and tools of her mother\u2019s workshop. \u201cFrom a very young age, I had the urge to create pieces that spoke of literature or poetry, interweaving the materiality of fabric with poems,\u201d she recalls. With her grandmother, she acted as a helping hand, making labels and performing other repetitive tasks. She also learned to write with a quill and apply gold leaf with a brush.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00c9lise Peroi, installation view of \u201cFor Thirsting Flowers\u201d at CARVALHO, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and CARVALHO.<\/p>\n

During her textile studies, she practiced the Chinese meditative martial art qi gong, and she\u2019s since sought to integrate its embodied understanding of space into her process. Today, the non-woven spaces in her work evoke breath, inviting a form of presence within the landscapes she constructs. <\/p>\n

The writings of philosophers such as Fran\u00e7ois Jullien\u2014especially his 2014 book Vivre de paysage\u2014offered her a way to think of landscape not as a static image, but as something traversed and inhabited. This experiential approach continues to guide Peroi\u2019s installations, which hover between architecture and nature\u2014spaces of circulation where even the veins of a leaf can be read as a narrative.<\/p>\n

More recently, Peroi has grown especially excited about exploring the relationship between weaving and painting, two practices that have long shaped her work. She\u2019s interested in painting not just as an image, but as a material ensemble\u2014canvas, frame, and support\u2014where no element dominates and each holds equal weight in shaping the work. This has led her to experiment with smaller formats that recall classical marine paintings. Since moving to Arles, she has also embraced a broader palette and begun playing with the natural sheen of silk threads\u2014dulling where it\u2019s painted, glowing where left bare. <\/p>\n

Her work often seems to lead her before she fully knows the way. And yet, there were clues even when she was specializing in weaving in Brussels. \u201cI don\u2019t remember saying so but apparently,\u201d she said, \u201cfriends remind me I always wanted to make woven paintings.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Peroi, it seems, the thread has been there all along.<\/p>\n

The Artsy Vanguard 2026<\/p>\n

The Artsy Vanguard is now in its eighth year of highlighting the most promising artists working today. As 2026 approaches, we\u2019re celebrating 10 talents poised to become future leaders of contemporary art and culture. <\/p>\n

Explore more of The Artsy Vanguard 2026<\/a> and browse works by the artists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva<\/p>\n

Video by Pushpin Films \/ Thibault Royer for Artsy.<\/p>\n

Thumbnail: Portrait of \u00c9lise Peroi by Salah Boutayeb, 2025. Courtesy of Carvalho; \u00c9lise Peroi, from left to right: details of \u201cSonges II,\u201d 2022, and \u201cLa lune,\u201d 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Carvalho.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I stumbled just before reaching the door of \u00c9lise Peroi\u2019s home and studio in Arles, France. While the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[26050,442,498,499,500,83263,501,83262,156,111,139,69,37156],"class_list":{"0":"post-117437","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-artist-profiles","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-artsdesign","13":"tag-carvalho","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-elise-peroi","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-new-zealand","18":"tag-newzealand","19":"tag-nz","20":"tag-vanguard"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}