CHANTAL DE DEKEN

Chantal De Deken's work is a moving universe of vertical lines, combined with a highly personal vision of color. Her work is marked by an incessant quest for repetitive rhythm, multiplication, and declension in a play of intersecting and superimposed lines. There is nothing cold or dry about this meticulous painting; the texture is vibrant, offering the viewer the spectacle of an organic geometry in the throes of change. The line, on its "almost perfect" journey to elevation, undergoes an abrupt interruption, partly by chance. Each line has a life of its own, with a beginning and an end, and in the in-between appears what Chantal calls: the accident of the journey. Although she works mainly with acrylics, the artist expresses this concept by sometimes applying, at a precise point on the line, a mixture of which she has the secret, which is superimposed on the first layer, still wet. She then lets the material "work" in its own time. A process of seepage gradually develops, leading to a dilatory expansion of the line, before finally returning to verticality, in a form of resilience.