Gaëlle Josse : écrire avec la peinture du XVIIe siècle

Gaëlle Josse is an author who has made intermediality one of the characteristics of her literary research and her writing: the arts, music and painting in particular, solicit her creative reverie, and she seizes works and artists of the past to compose her narrative texts. She has published three works which are marked with the painting of the seventeenth century: the text "Les heures silencieuses" was generated from an encounter with the interior painting with a woman playing spruce Emanuel de Witte, made around 1660; "L'Ombre de nos nuits" is derived from the vision of Georges de la Tour's painting San Sebastian cared for by Irene, from 1649; and in "Vermeer, entre deux songes", she proceeds to a reverie around Young Sleeping Girl composed by the Flemish painter in 1657. In these works the reflection on the pictorial techniques accompanies the questioning on the power of the artistic creation, as well as on the issues of the reception and the craze of the contemporary spectator for the works of the past. The article offers a reading of the texts where the author takes us inside her relationship with the paintings and proposes intimate stories centered on young women and their relationship to life, family and reality. who surrounds them.