This new solo show of Francine Van Hove, "Drawings & Paintings", is centered on her preparatory studies and their materialization in painting. Since the 1970s, she has developed an intimate work that stands apart from art trends and is entirely devoted to the female body.
Trained like painters of the 19th century who were born before the invention of photography, Van Hove works from live model and "by hand", according to a very classic process: the drawing of a first study on vellum paper after the gestural transposition of the starting idea, followed by a second with the same model or another, or even a third if necessary, etc.; then an adjusting of the faces on tracing papers to give the illusion of space; and the preparatory staging in charcoal and white chalk on kraft paper from her tracings taped on the studio walls - in the case of a scene with several characters, all the studies are arranged on the wall for the "dress rehearsal", a kind of virtual collective posing session with the "character-objects" (tea, coffee, drawings, books, lamps, etc.); after this advanced development, a transfer on the canvas including a rework with the brush in the presence of the model. These drawings constitute a vast formal repertoire of feminine attitudes, delicately emphasized by a richness of effects of light, shadow and volume, which recalls her affinities with the masters of the Renaissance.
Her illusionist and narration-less painting merges with reality and frees itself from it. The extremely meticulous description of bodies and materials serves a personal mythology, embodied by her models. Understudies of the artist but also of the characters that Van Hove admires in Egyptian and ancient Greek statuary as well as in the masterpieces of painting, these young women solemnize the small daily gestures to ward off anguish. They transfigure reality, deliberately reduced to the closed interior of her studio or garden, in a harmoniously suspended time: a parenthesis of calm without luxury nor voluptuousness, slightly disturbed by a few still lifes of flowers, simple pleasures, sentimental objects or old editions of novels that highlight this fragile balance. In this trompe-l'oeil interval, between indolence and sophistication, daydream and half-consciousness, Van Hove gives form and face to allegorical beauty, both familiar and elusive: "The more I try to grasp or to capture beauty, the more its mystery escapes me. But that neither surprises me nor despairs me any longer, for I have been seized by a passion for this very pursuit. No matter how vain it may sometimes appear to me, it has become my life". Her enchanting fascination for the innate grace of women reveals, according to the words of Belgian writer Jacques De Decker, "a conservatory of epiphanies". This pagan praise of the body, this choreographic language of gestures crystallize the quintessence and the unchanged of femininity.
