Christine Darmuzey’s paintings reveal her interior world, a world of energy and serenity. Her abstract painting takes root in a major observation of reality, more interiorized; the anchorage points are the moving model and music: both stimulate her creation of shapes and colours. The artist expresses the life, the dynamism of the body, the vibration of sounds, the felt emotion. This exacerbation of the sensitive world is expressed by several techniques and research in the same painting.
Her love for colour guides her; she escapes in a kind of meditation; a force is expressed through contrasts: warmth of the oranges and brown tones, cold connotations of greens, clairs-obscurs of whites and blacks. Colours respond to each other in a musical harmony. Added to this coloured patch several techniques are used: expressive acrylic brushstrokes, fluidity of walnut staining or of Indian ink. Aspects of transparency evoke her taste for watercolour, and acrylic paint her pleasure in layering brushstrokes.
New shapes with clear or blurred outlines spring out from the chromatic explosion, the empty spaces alterning with full ones in an internal coherence. Flat surfaces of colours creating tangled up volumes, contrast with sharp lines of pastels or Indian ink. These features of Eastern influence found a breath evoked by the speed of the gesture. Her meeting with the Asian world deeply influenced her approach.
After the first inspiration, the painting may evolve with a mix of instinct,spontaneity, study and patience.
The result is the restitution of a fleeting emotion, of a sensory experience which takes her away from reality. Christine likes to quote Zao Wou-Ki: “I paint my own life, but I also seek to paint an invisible space, that of the dream, of a place where one is always in harmony even in the agitated forms of contrary forces”.
The constant questioning of her work and the enigma of creation produces lively paintings. Filled with the sensitivity of the artist, the picture presents a true microcosm of rhythm and balance, which must result in “ going beyond external appearance of the matter to deliver its intimate content” (Michel Henry).
Adeline Castéja
