PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS

During the elaboration of Blondes…, a long series of line drawings was made. Often they evoke the figure of a dancer, or of a creature of an unknown order. Dancer and beings –the difference is not always clear—are in movement. Their body can assume various forms : it expands, it condensates, it is in continuous metamorphosis. Its multifarious character is not a play of forms. The figures are the graphic sediment –rapid, often in one single stroke of the pen-- of the psycho corporal energy : energy of one ephemeral fraction of the dance and of its experience. The drawings evoke a state of being, linked to one moment. There is no clear development. Drawing, like dancing, is a non-ending human condition.
Here, the dancing existence takes shape : not through an outsider who observes the dancer, but through the dancing body, gifted with the talent to translate itself in a plastic way. In their bare essentials, these drawings involuntary recall eastern Zen calligraphy or pictorial brush work. They do not strive for a representational aesthetics but for seizing an existential energy, as volatile as intense : the intensity of full presence, which is also aspired at in butoh spirit. Their beauty lies in this almost impossible grasping of the elusive, like a once traced dance movement is as ephemeral as irrevocable
Recently, Pé has started to explore this energy pictorially. Her paintings seem to await the uncertain and the unpredictable. Like in her dance, Pé avoids everything that inclines to pathos : the colors are sober, to her, color is too restless and too ‘easy’. Like in her dance, these paintings conjure up a multiform energy, welling up from the layered inner tissues. White or black are not the non-color of death, but the culmination of the prism, of the colors of the deep organism’s manifold layers.
Some paintings are analogous to the drawings : light, white, etheric, sharp, subtle, flashing, oniric. They reveal energetic structures of which the body is only one manifestation. It interacts with bodies or, better, energies of unknown nature and unclear provenance, experienced through an extreme sensitivity.

My eye becomes my ear,
My ear  my  nose, my nose my mouth.
My mind is integrated and my body dissolves.
Bones and flesh are melting.
I am blown away, east and west...
Does the wind ride me or do I ride the wind ( Lieh Tzu)

Pé's plastic works is characterized by a continuous metamorphosis, just like
there is no repetitive movement in her dance, even if it goes on for hours.
'Repetition is death' (Vazlaw Nijinski). But searching the new for its own
sake is also sterile. Pé's  creations come forth from a unconditional
surrender to the moment, always inimitable, always flowing. It is as
necessary as free.

'Even there, where no space exists,
enters
what is without substance' (Tao te ching, XLIII)

Paul Vandenbroeck

Paintings

Drawings