L'âme de fond

The exhibition 'L'âme de fond' ('Heart and soul') combines pictorial works by Héléna Darcq, French painter, and sculptural porcelain works by Fabienne Christyn, Belgian artist. The exhibition aims to create a universe in which the works scrutinize themselves, question themselves, talk to themselves, stimulate themselves and highlight themselves. The paintings of Héléna Darcq have the energy of the eternal instant and calmly interact with the sculptures of Fabienne Christyn, that cause a persistent high emotion.

Fabienne Christyn
The approach of Fabienne Christyn is simultaneously a reflection and an artistic proposal on the question: "How to flexibly accompany the movement of life in order to realize its potential."
What she wants to develop is a reflection on the intimate relationship we have with the elements of our daily environment. - This everyday environment which is firstly a colourful and waving set, which we call everyday life, where she can find mental events, objects, situations, communication relationships with others, words, landscapes, etc.
All these disparate elements appear only if her conscience has detected them by an effort of attention. Dust found according to her paths, abandoned materials ... are the object of her attentions.
Each intervention comes to enrich the usual subjects, superimposing different reading strata upon them. One then captures them in a new light, sometimes conceptually.
Technically, her work is performed in several stages: she observes her subject to soak into the forces and resonances it has, in order to receive it.
When an intimate relationship develops between her and the subject, a kind of fullness wraps her. The time seems to be suspended. At the limit of happiness.
Then, she tries to make emerge a meaning under her observation, and to tell stories. And finally, she gives them to see.

Héléna Darcq
Challenged by Chinese aesthetics, Héléna Darcq has spent two years in China to practice painting and calligraphy with master painters and calligraphers.
Her work is strongly influenced by Chinese thought, both in the act of painting but also in the meditative character of her paintings.
Nature is omnipresent in her work. As in traditional Chinese painting, she attempts to translate the profound force of nature, the essence of her beauty itself. She also seeks to recreate the emotions that nature arouses in us, without us even being aware.
Her painting is a painting of the suggestion, where we must succeed to express this invisible in a single gesture. Painting is then a quick process where there is no place for repentance. Everything is the result of a previous work of internalizing gestures and breath, a deep memorizing of the shape that the whole body will express.
She uses colour in the background of her paintings to reveal the shape and intensity of ink shades she manufactures based on organic pigments. Extremely volatile, this pigment creates a powdery and matte finish which invites to the touch.
Tree barks, the slenderness of branches or twisting of gnarled trunks are her main sources of inspiration. Though these natural elements undergo a process of abstraction that releases them from the real, we cannot speak for abstract paintings as these forms remind us of deeply buried images.