PRESENTATION

 

Discovering the artist's secret garden through his works is not an easy thing or a truly sought-after goal.

The very strong personality of Françoise HOUZE is felt through the pictorial symphony whose shapes, colors, lights are the artisans of a music that enchants.
Abundance of very large format works (2.40mx1.60m...), free canvases, without frames, hung on white walls, stone walls or outside...from the material to the sign, these works speak to the touch as much as to the view.

Françoise HOUZE attaches essential importance to the “support”, the canvas on which she will apply her colors is first worked, kneaded, coated, cut out, patched, there are superpositions of various canvases, glued, hung…. The colors are also worked on, all techniques are used with the exception of a ready-made paint, with a predilection for "gesso" used no longer as a coating but as a color: a matt white with captivating relief. The artist is attentive to the light, the material, the pure paint that she will transform and the result of mixing the dyes.

The method of preparation takes on a particular character, almost a rite: it is first of all, a face to face then an osmosis with the support which will be used, the artist caresses the canvas, touches it , soaks it up as if to know it better, to tame it better, it scares him. The encounter is completely physical, sensual between the painter and the material on which she will base her work.

Then comes the application of paint: a very personal technique, never an easel F.HOUZE places his large formats on the ground and then spreads his colors, standing, kneeling, sitting...the work, gestural at the beginning, then becomes more intimate, the chaos is dominated by technical knowledge and the artist enters a state of creative pleasure which is the very essence of his compositions.

The colors are precious and highlight the largely intuitive nature of his choices in terms of lines, they are spread out in bands, in well-defined sectors, the canvas is built over the visual paths, the space is diffracted, the background is in perpetual movement, it never ceases to spring forward through a play of tasks, strong points...The variation of blues sometimes bordered with gold is characteristic of F.HOUZE's painting. She underlines her colors, highlights them in geometric shapes with often blurred contours (squares, rectangles, essentially), a disordered but balanced geometry, which highlights the artist's work and highlights the finesse of the paste. colorful, its transparency.

The contrast between the smooth material and thicker, granular substances, inserted in spaces defined in an imprecise but apparent way gives the work a "non finito" aspect on which the artist seems to be able to constantly intervene, retouch, reshape , add…

In another type of work that she presents as large-format books that one would like to leaf through and which could be placed on a lectern, the pages are placed one on top of the other, wrapped in a fragment of fabric. The optical conception of the work is underlined here by a personal writing traced, scratched, the canvas seems to have been ironed with whitewash then rewritten, but half erased, almost illegible...we discover a few fragments of words, neo palimpsests? the colors here are darker, bistres bordered with gold, parchments on which time has left its mark, erased the words (Secrets? Symbols? Unsaid? Questioning the passing of time? Sustainability? Anti-sustainability?. )

Talent, technique, passion…


M.F . CALLOT