Patrice-Flora Praxo

Notable figures

Patrice Flora Praxo was born on November 24, 1966 in Les Abymes, Guadeloupe. Necessity led her to leave her native land for mainland France in 1976 at the age of nine, to join her sisters in Les Mureaux, in the Paris suburbs. Her first experience of mainland France proved difficult; she recovered only with difficulty from the uprooting and the wrench. Put in charge of her young nephews and nieces, the responsibilities entrusted to her were too heavy to bear and incompatible with her young age; at her own request, she obtained in 1981 to be taken into care by the DASS until she came of age.
She then trained at the art school of the Paris American Academy, then prepared the entrance exam for the conservatory with Bakary Sangaré, which she narrowly failed. She nevertheless embraced the acting career for which she was destined, before also becoming a photographer, then a painter.

She got her first role in 1986 at the age of 19 in a TV film: "Azizah, la fille du fleuve" by Niamkoko, in which she plays the character of an African woman. It was followed by several other films and television series: "Les coeurs brûlés" in 1992, "Le juge est une femme", "Deux flics" in 1998, and more recently, in 2009, "Le Diable noir", a documentary-fiction by Claude Ribbe.
In cinema, she appears in the role of Mariam alongside Nicolas Cage for "Le Raccourci" by Giuliano Montaldo, and worked with the actor Tchéky Karyo on "Atlantide" by Bob Swain in 1992. Along her acting path, she crossed paths with important directors, in registers as varied as "Le Roi Lear" by Jean Luc Godard, "Vanille Fraise", a comedy by Gérard Oury, "Le Bal des Casses-pieds" by Yves Robert, "Adultère Mode d'emploi" by Christine Pascal, Les Fleurs du mal, by Jean-Pierre Rawson after Baudelaire (1991), and Black Dju by Pol Cruchten.

As a photographer, she specializes mainly in portraits of personalities, writers and thinkers, such as Albert Cossery, Gonzague Saint-Bris, Isabelle Sorrente.

Her encounter with the work of the Croatian painter Zoran Music strongly influenced her and marked a turning point in her professional orientation. Painting gradually took on growing importance for her, and led her to slow down her film activity.

Her pictorial research, at the edge of abstraction, is imbued with her quest and her reflection on her origins, the difficult relations of the Antillean community with Africa, exile, barbarism, annihilation. The "Traces" series is the culmination of more than four years of work, which she conceives as the repair of her own suffering.

In 2007 she produced an important first exhibition on the memory of slavery, presented by the Galerie Agnès Dutko, in Paris on rue Bonaparte. The catalogue is prefaced by the poet Édouard Glissant, who describes her canvases as tragic and beautiful. In 2010, she exhibited in Ozoir la Ferrière for the second time.

For many years the partner of the French singer-songwriter, performer and writer Yves Simon, he dedicated some of his titles on the album "Rumeurs" to her.