Exhibition of Rêves & Réalité paintings by the Sirènes association

Sirènes events at the Tourist Office
Dreams & Reality

The surrealist artistic movement long ago opened up a space where dreams and reality coexist.
Salvador Dali, with his soft watches, is the perfect embodiment of this vision.
The boundaries between dreams and reality are crumbling!
By mixing elements of reality and dreams, the artist's aim is to change both his perception of life and ours.
Today, more than ever, we are all romanticizing our lives in one way or another, some taking photos, others filming their daily lives. Everyone feels the need to magnify their reality to a greater or lesser extent!
What about the artists who are showing us what the theme of this exhibition inspires in them?
Dreams & Reality, the artists...

Michèle Alexandre
A graduate in Applied Arts from the Duperre School of Art in Paris, Michèle comes from a family of teachers, and her parents have always encouraged her interest in art. She worked for 10 years as a designer in advertising agencies in Paris.
For her, painting is a necessity, like a musician's instrument. She is always on the lookout for places, objects and techniques such as yellowed paper, stitched with different shades and textures. Her personality is expressed in the emotional and sentimental impact of her artistic creations.
She has taken painting courses in Morocco, Portugal and South Africa.
She has exhibited in galleries in La Ciotat, St Cyr/mer, Aix-en-Provence, Théoule/mer and Rieux-le-Minervois.

Dreams and Reality
For the theme of this exhibition, she chose these paintings because they all show people resting while dreaming.


Dom-G
Dominique Gatuingt - aka Dom-G - is a self-taught visual artist. She recently retired from the French Ministry of Education. She mainly creates portraits integrated into collages. The background to her work is made up of pages from novels or images directly related to the portrait.
Tearing, pasting, recomposing and superimposing are all part of her creative process. Her aim is to tell stories or encourage people to imagine stories. She works with Posca and alcohol markers.

Dreams & Reality
Dreams and reality are two sides of the same coin. Each of us is confronted with these two components throughout our lives. Living the life we dream of, putting it off, getting round it, confronting our dreams with reality. Dreams cannot be imprisoned, they always find a way.


Nadia Paret
Nadia Paret discovered painting over ten years ago and has made it her refuge. Each canvas is an expression of freedom and self-confidence, carried by a joyful energy.
Her optimistic work has been exhibited in a variety of venues and now travels the world, from New Zealand to California and Northern Ireland.

Dreams & Reality
She chose these paintings because they perfectly convey the dialogue between the near and the unknown. Her paintings are an invitation to travel - a balance between what anchors her and what calls her. Through colour and movement, she seeks to create landscapes that evoke both familiar places and distant horizons. These works do more than simply represent a place; they open a window onto a dreamy, suggested elsewhere that is both accessible and mysterious. With this exhibition, she wants to offer visitors a moment of escape, an opportunity to let their gaze and imagination wander, between dream and reality.

Valérie Prybylek
Valérie has been painting for 15 years. It has become such a compelling need for her that she changed her life to make time for it. Her training at the Beaux-Arts de La Seyne/Mer, enriched by courses with international artists in watercolour and drawing in a live model studio, enabled her to turn her passion into a profession. Today, her exploration of watercolour has led her to other discoveries: inks, new pigments, composition... and new subjects that she discovers on her travels.
Watercolour helps her to express her emotions about landscapes, encounters and journeys that she wants to share. This technique, using water and the fusion of pigments on her paper, corresponds to her sensibility. It helps her to transcribe the quality of light in her region, the transparency, the backlighting.
She paints from the motif because she draws from it an intact emotion that drives her creation, then sketches and photographs help her to enrich her subject and rework it in the studio so that a different impression emerges from her paintings.
Then everyone is free to interpret...

Dreams & Reality
Dreams and reality, the same duality expressed in my watercolours that everyone is free to interpret. The pleasure of pigments melting in water, like a sweet dream that never ends, and that little awakening that brings me back to reality.


If you would like to purchase a work from this exhibition, please contact the artist.

The Sirènes association
Sirènes, an association under the law of 1901, has been bringing together painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, photographers, engravers, ceramists and arts and craftspeople from La Ciotat and the surrounding area since 2017. Sirènes' ambition is to bring together a group of artists to initiate ideas and projects on a permanent basis.
Sirènes is committed to ensuring that art reaches out to the public and is accessible to all, whether in schools or businesses, on the street or in dedicated venues.
Sirènes organises events and activities to enable artists from the association and other artists from La Ciotat and elsewhere to exhibit their work.
Les rendez-vous des Sirènes at the Tourist Office
Since September 2021, Sirènes and the La Ciotat Tourist Office have been working in partnership to promote artists from La Ciotat and the surrounding area. There will be four events during the year, each time showcasing four artists at the Tourist Office.

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