DIALOGUE WITH
LAURENT DEVELAY

Chance - “Chance talks, genius listens” - Victor Hugo

Should artistic creation be thoughtful, calculated with a well-established process and a defined objective? This is what Renaissance artists, notably Alberti, thought. Nothing was left to chance except perhaps for Leonardo da Vinci who advocated chance as a fabulous opportunity for painting.

The freedom of an artist, for Françoise Houze, is precisely to be able to create without knowing where we are going, to create in order to move towards surprise.

“A dress bought a long time ago, a piece of fabric found through a chance meeting. I chose them or they imposed themselves on me. They entered the privacy of my workshop, took their place and armed themselves with patience. Until I rediscovered them. Their past and my present mingle, the alchemy is ready to happen.”

The technique that runs through the creation is simple, the canvas is a blotter but an imprudent blotter, the idea being to give it another dimension, by serving as a medium, a fabric, torn, stretched, mishandled, arranged, made to please . The juxtaposition of these two sensualities facilitated by an insinuating painting, warm colors do the rest.

 

It’s “as if this dress was forgotten at the bottom of a closet and which, when it resurfaces in broad daylight, takes me back to the past, my past as a woman. Its fabric, the fold of a spring dress, the transparency of a summer dress, memories that collide and bring back images to our minds, flavors, smells, tactile sensations.”

Nadine Vasseur expresses this aptly: “the world never stops changing. From geological folds to folds on the water, from the wrinkles of the body to the drapes of clothing, the fold is the very movement of life and it is its trace.”

For Françoise Houze, the fold is a promise sometimes not kept, a letter that leaves to carry love, the movement of a fabric, the crest of a wave: “yes the fold, by its movement, by its relief, is promising in the art that I practice.

The material? it is a tool, but we must see beyond its omnipresence. Perceiving its lightness, its carelessness, its almost irresponsibility, pushes us to imagine ourselves within it, torn as we often are between the fibers, the folds and its overall impression.

The succession of layers leads to transparency - the controlled colors bring us back to fashion, to the disembodied woman, to this feeling of strangeness, this body that floats and this soul that sparkles. Reuniting this body, connecting it to the soul, a necessity.

 

Painting, creating, is a necessity for the artist, a need more than a gift: “I often say that I paint like I do housework. Without thinking, almost by reflex. Create clarity within me, this self which sometimes disembodies itself. Highlight, clean, tidy and feel better once the job is well done.”

We could let ourselves go and see the second degree of this sentence take precedence over everything else. “Walking around my workshop, the fabric falls before my eyes, it imposes itself. I take it, check its texture, its sensuality. I hasten to feel it, to guess its life, its origin.” The artist then imagines it as a piece of the puzzle of his next creation.

Need to play with the material, to leave room for randomness, for chance. Painting on this transparent veil causes the paint to pierce through, the back is painted but also the support. Where is the other side? Where is the location ?

This necessity, artistic practice as a solitary exercise, for Françoise Houze, is the happiness of life. Of course there is also the view of the other, of others. “Even if I don't impose anything, even if this entire journey does not have the ultimate goal of pleasing, the interest and the questioning, the wonder sometimes, comfort me in my approach. That my work questions, that it does not leave one indifferent, it is already a victory, the victory of an approach, the victory of an aesthetic research, the story of a life.”


Interview and texts - Laurent Develay - winter 2017.