Looking at Sophie Delaunoy’s painting… by RENAUD ARCHAMBAULT DE BEAUNE
For an artist, it is a perilous work that the one of writing an introduction about the painting of a friend you have known for fifteen years, and of whom you have followed the progress of her artistic path. I gladly agreed to this task in order to salute the courage, the work and the perseverance that Sophie Delaunoy has needed during all those years for the purpose of crossing the line between ‘pastime’ painting and actually becoming a painter.
Those who think that painting is a natural and spontaneous thing are wrong. Having a white canvas, putting it on an easel and preparing your colours is not enough for a peculiar universe, a different or parallel space, to spring up from the surface. A space where the matter of resemblance and verisimilitude is secondary. A space where the internal demands of the picture, the allocation of forms, colours and their accurate links, are primary. Thus, the surfaces organize themselves, bond and crystallize together in order to, perhaps, create a work capable itself to shatter the spectator’s way of looking and thinking, so as to invite them to an inner journey.
A few years ago, when I saw her figurative paintings which were inspired by bits of painted wood sculptures found in Breton churches, I knew that Sophie Delaunoy had ‘entered Painting’. Cherubs and statues of eighteenth Century Saints were pretexts to her for the execution of a series of vibrant, jubilant and quite contemporary paintings. Each and everyone could feel the pleasure she had put in their making.
Today, while looking at Sophie Delaunoy’s recent and more allusive paintings : suggestions of human silhouettes, lined up as some mysterious ideograms from an obscure alphabet, the spectator understands that those are images loaded with meaning and work, and can, at the same time, acknowledge their fragility.
Alignments of colourful figures emerge, from a pictorial space where form and content are tightly bound together. In these paintings, the background is not just a background, a neutral and residual void; it carves shapes out of the gaps, which resonate and overlap with the figures so as to form a homogeneous and consistent universe. Sophie Delaunoy has understood the gist of Georges Braque’s thought, which says that “what is most difficult about painting is not to paint something, but to paint the ‘in between’ of it”.
One quality of this work lies in an economy of means and a choice of colourful, luminous and simple harmonies. Here, contrasts are franc; pairs of complementary colours, warm and cold or quality contrast. Successive coverings sometimes betray former steps traces, as if the painting was telling the story of its genesis. The painter’s questionings, doubts, repentances and uncertainties sometimes allow themselves to be sensed through the painting.
Nietzche wrote. that art does not need any certainty. It does not have to be concerned about where it is going. It moves towards its goal, simply, by itself, because art is inclined to soar and spread.
