Cécile Davidovici is an embroidery artist from Paris. She had a creative childhood and studied drama, film, and theatre, going on to write and direct movies exploring the link between innocence and illusion. After finishing drama and theater studies, Cécile set to review filmmaking in New York town as her next step. While in NYC, the movies that she wrote and directed have been displayed at festivals throughout the world, some receiving multiple awards.
She discovered embroidery after losing her mother and began to stitch images of her fading childhood memories. Still working to her themes of innocence and illusion, she wanted to capture and consider the hazy moments from her past, that she had glimpsed in old family home movie videotapes. Davidovici has been able to adapt this new medium to permit herself to anchor her art within the moment. Creating the medium of textiles her own, twiddling with threads in the manner a painter would with paint, she is carving out her own niche within the complex world of contemporary art.
Portraits of a constant dream is a series of feminine portraits, entirely hand embroidered. They portray a close-up of one face that becomes two, with no clue on the era. The faces are nearly identical, however, one is often bigger, more present, hiding half of the other.
The meticulous intertwining of threads that depict skin creates a new form of transparency that unveils the person behind the face. These women stare at us but in reality, they are looking within themselves, questioning their contradictions, revealing their doubts. Their openness and vulnerability even allow the audience to see a part of themselves when looking at the subjects. Davidovici places her own unique spin on the medium of textiles and by layering threads as a painter would with a paintbrush, she re-interprets the face differently, giving a new shape to these faces, opening a door for a reinvention, a new skin, a new story.