Emilie Terlinden & Isabelle Bonté

Emilie Terlinden presented at the exhibition Canvases painted in oil in which appear living and natural and that narrate about individual worlds, full of symbolism and questioning. In plans with deep perspective, characters are massed with a look full of uncertainty, frozen in the fabric of time and society, in the evanescence of life; they seem to peer into the invisible. The lush trees and plants that surround them give them a deep humanity and emphasize the unique bond linking the being to nature. What is man in front of himself? What does he actually perceive from his surroundings? How do his thoughts, his memories and those of others turn into images in his mind? The artist, in her work, refers to the unconscious, to the hidden parts of a reality invisible to the eye, but tangible to mind. Timeless images. One way of thinking about human nature and its condition.
Isabelle Bonté presented at the exhibition some works on the concept of deletion. What remains to us from the past, from the people crossed? Just a gesture, a pose, a look; this is what Isabelle Bonté seems to tell us. Her paintings, whose colour palette is reduced to a strict minimum, by the use of paraffin, show us people we rather distinguish than see. Delete a face is operated by a cutting bias: the artist chooses to suggest rather than represent. As if the game here was to know which of the elusive mystery of being or of the very practical mechanisms of posture mattered most in building a personality. Indeed, how Isabelle Bonté deconstructs the portrait is not an erasure of the subject. Instead, all in the construction of these beings is striking. These paintings question us. They seem to explore the sensitive: their subject, as if lost in the limbo of memory, roams in a boundless background, between insurance, sensuality and despair. The artist plunges the viewer into reflecting on the envelope, what surrounds us, the walls of cities, the skin of things, the bark of beings. Organizing gaps, voids in the representations, she pushes the spectator to reinvent bodies of which there are only fragments, breaths, texts, postures, organic signs. Thus the encounter with her favourite material makes sense. Paraffin comes from the Latin parum affinis, "which has little affinity". These two words, -paraffin / affinity-, proceed from the same formal essence, we find in the material what marks the link, the potential combination. So working with paraffin is working on what separates and unites. Working with paraffin, is playing with the notions of frontier, veil and view. Working with paraffin is to create a second skin, tight. "The skin is the front line of the subject" (Michel Serres)