VERONIQUE ENGELS

An active force to celebrate the soul of the world

If the soul has a color, if the light of the world takes on a tangible reality, it is in the works of Véronique Engels that we can find its undeniable quintessence. By the shimmering of the pigments, the colored vibrations, by the power of the spurts, of the lively gestures on the canvas, she shares with us her wonder for life. And it's contagious.

Her journey has taken her through different countries, from India to Morocco, from Thailand to Tunisia (where she exhibits and stays regularly, alternating with the north of France). She returns bursting with memories and emotions, which she knows how to restore in celebratory paintings. The polychrome spirit of the universe, the consciousness of being are recomposed in an alchemy of very personal creative movement.

  Here, the breath of inspiration materializes in a supernatural, magical form, for an ode to life constantly renewed.

We guess it is nourished by earth and spirituality. She has a sense of the sacred animist. The artist has created his own pictorial vocabulary: a language that one feels almost uncontrolled, which explodes in multicolored sheaves, in bright drips, black or bright red, tracing astonishing hieroglyphics of the universal and the timeless, translating the immarcescible and permanent beauty of the world...

The works of Véronique Engels are illuminations, in the Rimbaldian sense of the term. She knows how to be “seeing”. A sublimated vision of what surrounds us, rid of everything that screens between our heart and the heart of the world. She restores the lost link between the different active forces of creation, in a work on the edge of the abstract and the figurative, between an abundant expressionism and a raw art with reinvented lyricism. The canvas is often scraped, rubbed, erased, the material abounds, reflecting the abundance of life.

His characters accomplish the miracle of being both ethereal and irresistibly anchored in the telluric, matter. They have the lightness of legendary beings, spirits in weightlessness without feet to connect them to the ground, with radiating outlines, with radiant auras; however, their concrete, grounded character, like sketches escaped from the primordial Creation, is beyond doubt. The spirit becomes matter when the breath passes, enthusiastic in the first sense (inspired by a supernatural source).

Véronique Engels reports on the harmony of the world, the beauty of nature (flowers and trees are increasingly present in her major recent works), its purity, far from toxic rumors and the storm of our times. . It is a salutary work, with saving and necessary energy.

She also expresses this purity in her imposing spherical ceramics, resembling ideal planets, lands of contrasts, where everything coexists in harmony, from scars to peaceful expanses.

So much positive energy, so many emotions transmitted from one heart – that of the artist – to another – ours, the spectator –; it would be unconscious to miss it. It is a fascinating opportunity to penetrate the unfathomable mystery of the world and the depths of the human soul.

Jean-Henri Maisonneuve