Gloria Avril

Born in 1998 and a graduate of the Duperré School of Applied Arts, Gloria Avril lives and works in Paris. Her work is an invitation to a still wandering, deeply fueled by the aesthetics of American independent films, from David Lynch to Jim Jarmusch. Using a meticulous colored pencil technique, she deploys a sober and restrained palette to capture the essence of suspended places: isolated motels, deserted roads, and vast spaces where silence becomes palpable.

Gloria's work explores the tension between the immensity of melancholy landscapes and the almost transgressive intimacy of hotel rooms. Within this near-darkness emerge female figures with a strange luminescence, at once sensual and disembodied. Her drawings do not follow a linear script; they read like a fragmented long dream, a poetic drift between dream and reality. By freezing these moments of inhabited solitude, Gloria Avril creates a contemporary mythology of waiting and mystery, where every pencil stroke seems to vibrate with a muted luminous intensity.

For her residency at Rocabella, Gloria Avril joins the 'Guardians of the Sea' project with a proposal that transposes her Lynchian universe into the Mediterranean depths. Moving away from American motels, she explores the estate as a place of passage between two worlds: dry land and the abyss. Her challenge is to translate the figure of the free-diver as an extension of her luminescent female characters, moving in the absolute silence of the seabed.

The project focuses on creating a series of nocturnal drawings where the Rocabella estate—its sleeping gardens, its villas with lit windows—becomes the setting for an underwater fable. Gloria will use her signature technique to capture the strange luminescence of bodies in apnea, transforming the water into a deep, liquid night. Her 'Guardians' are not just protectors of the ecosystem, but dreamlike apparitions inhabiting the coastline as one inhabits a secret place. Through this research, she aims to offer a magnetic vision of the sea, where the swimmer's solitude meets the melancholy of solitary landscapes, creating a poetic and mysterious dialogue at the heart of this azure sanctuary.