Léa Mestres Jessy

Léa Mestres’ colourful artworks are palpably full of joy and emotion. Flying in the face of tradition and rebelling against lofty art historical concepts to be taken ‘seriously’, Mestres deliberately choses an approach to her work that is humorous, light, and playful.

Despite this levity, Mestres’ artworks take the form of oversized towers made of cement and plaster. Their materials and size lend each work an architectural element, but each is also easily personified and given an anthropomorphic aura due to the personality imbued in them by Mestres. Their life-size dimensions are the result of the artist’s playing with scale and volume, as she delights in the ridiculousness that accompanies disproportion.

Jessy is named after a friend of Mestres, and coloured a bright pink as the she draws from a wide source of popular culture, from the fashion designer Valentino, to Missy Elliot’s music videos and Nikki Saint de Phalle’s iconic Tarot Garden in Italy.

Crepi, the plaster used in Jessy, is widely used across France and has left the artist with an enduring love of building façades, which are often found in a state of disrepair. Mestres transposes this material into a new context, revitalising the material in her artworks which in turn lends them strength. Their surfaces are covered in small bumps to reference the plaster brioche and eggs that adorn the outer walls of the Salvador Dalí museum in Figueras, Spain. Mestres’ unique style perfectly captures a similar architectural surrealism.