Icônes Païennes - Anne Rabineau & Françoise Dangon

The world Françoise Dangon is presented through the photographs of Anne Rabineau: sculptures made from recycled materials, faces with bulging eyes, collages of fabrics, intriguing characters. Anne followed Françoise to her home in Patmos, and also Athens, in order to capture this portrait. In addition to her artworks, an insight into her creative process and her working environment are presented. Foreword by Laurent Danchin, writer, art critic.

Anne Rabineau has two passports. That of France where she was born in 1948 and that of Switzerland, where she currently lives. During her final year of school she made her first real trip. Twenty hours by train, direction Budapest. She spent a month in an unforgettable peasant family of geese breeders and was imbued with a passion to seek to recreate the authenticity of these encounters in her travels.

Working as a teacher, to finance her studies in modern literature, she soon left this path. The desire to travel was stronger than anything. Firstly to Spain and then England, for language practice. Then more distant destinations when she crossed the planet as a long haul flight attendant. A gateway to the world that led to a desire to discover ever more.

Back on terra firma, her first photographic journeys led her to Turkey in 1977. Her first collection of photos and first foray in the media. She moved to Lausanne in Switzerland and raised her two children. Working as a stylist for a women's magazine, the passion for travel never left, nor the ability to capture a photograph on the fly.

From 2007 to 2009, she took the road through southwest Asia and Eastern Europe. Leica in hand, she traveled by train and bus, without a roadmap, visiting random cities. She presented this series of travel photographs as a collection published in 2009.

A great lover of Greece, Anne Rabineau has travelled there every summer for many years, she regularly visits the island of Patmos. In 2010, she ventured a little further afield and stayed with the nuns of the monastery of Evangelismos. Each visit to Patmos is also marked by a desire and curiosity to discover that the new creations of Françoise Dangon in her small shop in Chora. One thing leading to another, the idea of a portrait of Françoise and her world was born. From these encounters was born the book Icônes Païennes.

Learn more about the author...

Françoise Dangon was born in Paris. Graduate of the School of Decorative Arts, she experimented for a few years: from ceramics to painting on silk, making puppets to book illustration. With a predilection for theater sets and costumes, a great talent was revealed that is still much appreciated today by her friends and directors alike.

But then came the desire to travel to Greece. First Athens, where she improvised as a French teacher in order to support her bohemian lifestyle, and then Patmos, the second port, where she opened a brocante shop and then a tiny store where she currently sells her creations. Creations honed from the landfills where she gleans old shoes rolled by the sea, dented bowls, rusty nails, hairy brushes and all sorts of bric-à-brac. From this motley harvest, revisited by her fancy,  strange creatures emerge. Pagan icons, modern-sounding but strangely archaic totems.