Lettre à moi-même #3

Text fragment by Harald F. Theiss
Lettre à moi-même is a multi-part project by Patricia Dreyfus, forming a vast and highly personal cosmos shaped by surrealist elements across drawing, embroidery and sculpture. At its core lies an autobiographical narrative that confronts questions of origin, identity and gender, challenging social norms and boundaries.
Rather than writing literal letters to herself, Dreyfus has developed a visual language of surreal signs. Her imagery emerges from inner necessity, often in states close to insomnia, unfolding intuitively and without censorship — akin to écriture automatique. Dreamlike scenes populated by hybrid beings, houses, trees, cages or birds create symbolic spaces suspended between memory and imagination.
The exhibition brings together works from L’Île imaginaire (2017), her embroideries, and the extensive drawing series les invisibles (2020), created during a period of societal standstill. Recurrent throughout is the motif of the head — the têtes — which forms an autonomous subject within her oeuvre. Modelled in clay or bronze, these heads possess a raw, archaic presence, while her drawn heads develop into a constructed mythology of individual, almost companion-like figures.
Through the interplay of drawing, textile and sculpture, Dreyfus projects an inner, contradictory world into space. As she writes in Die Imaginäre Insel (2017):
“I let myself be carried away by my imagination… filling the paper with a surreal world full of colour.”
by Harald F. Theiss
Foto: Min Kim