This new solo show of Francine Van Hove gathers a body of her recent paintings and is accompanied by the publication of a new monograph of her work over the past fifteen years.
Since the 1970s, Van Hove has not stopped to be in keeping with an exclusively figurative and feminine painting, intimist, with a virtuosity close to the one of Old Masters. She develops her compositions, based on an idea of subject, in collaboration with her models who are always young women. A long time of pose is necessary for translating attitudes into drawing (pierre noire or pastel) and for the final execution in oil on canvas. The decor of her Parisian studio, relocated to her garden in the countryside in Summer, only tolerates the bare minimum: drawings taped to the walls, antique furnitures, cushions, something sweet, tea or coffee sets, old editions of novel or art book… These recurring motifs, these still lifes inserted in the painting, constitute a kind of characters in their own right; stripped of any intrusive reference to the present time, these familiar objects participate in the nonchalant abandon of these models of classical beauty.
Ordinary everyday gestures - getting up, reading, dolling up, thinking, dozing off - are here prettified. Everything is only and delicately touched with the fingertips or the tip of lips, often through half-open eyes. In these precious moments, time is silently suspended. These young women transpose without emphasis the noble attitudes of Madonnas in scenes of domestic life lit by a soft light that favours daydream. Between mystery and simplicity, formal perfection and anecdotal register, Van Hove's painting seeks to capture the quintessence of femininity.
The result, classic, frees itself from any narrative interpretation: her motivations are exclusively visual. Van Hove refuses to give a meaning to her works other than the imperative need to create, against anguish, "paintings which are meant to be windows open on an imaginary world, so close to the real world that they can be mistaken for it". It is the description of a bubble without the slightest roughness, encapsulated out of time, where the bodies are idealized: a kind of intimate paradise patiently built that keeps itself at a distance from hustle and bustle, impermeable to all the world's injunctions. The appearance of happiness - for her work is not devoid of melancholy - comes from being able to rest, at home. In a sense, her painting asserts itself as a means and a goal. An ideal of wisdom, in short ...
