Veronique Engels
Véronique ENGELS, fierce sweetness
What a beautiful human and artistic discovery! I like the sincerity of the artist, his sensitivity and his clairvoyance. Egon Schiele and Séraphine (from Senlis) inadvertently invite themselves onto the canvas of the painter then in full creation. Véronique Engels borrows the strength of one and the false candor of the other.
The aesthetics and the vivacity of the colors specific to the artist explode on the large formats as on the small ones, even if the gesture is different there.
Véronique Engels transmits to us with each glance on her works an obvious energy, that which one guesses of the artist in her studio, in front of the canvas. Bright colors rub shoulders with a false simplicity of pastel backgrounds. From a sweet madness, the characters and the flowers spring.
What a joy to admire the work of Véronique Engels! A pure happiness, an evidence, a little something essential finally.
Marie Jousse, gallery owner
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Veronique Engels
She has, for the little that I know of it now, a beautiful utopian discourse, she calls for a change in the world, in mentalities, in language. (Also let the world roll down the slope it is on and it will eventually crash). This is how the artist poses his ultimatum, his dream. Nothing less. Beware of people who demand only the narrow and the reasonable.
Then, she has for her her painting of the hallucinated of the heart, her painting of amazed by life, of a lover, of a contemplative sister, of a spiritual, floral, aerial and earth-bound woman, her lively and warm rendering of a deep vision and powerful in hopes. Its expressive qualities. Its beautiful and disconcerting, unexpected singularity. His sense of invention, of alchemy. Crazy what and who meet here, in an enormous, free, decompartmentalised, exorbitant, cosmic, frightening fecundity: Archimboldo, Redon, Alechinsky, Séraphine de Senlis, Gustave Moreau, ... This pictorial universe banishes, it seems , the border that separates the figurative from the abstract, and invents an attractive autonomy, a space of freedom beyond genres. This ceramist, because Engels has several strings to her rainbow, dreams and creates a kind of warm and beneficent Eden, marvelously colored, lively and soothing. I am obviously on the threshold of the work. But I already want to take traces of it in my memory suitcases. There is song in this painting and I feel intoxicated, invigorated, called to refute any kind of resignation.
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Denys-Louis Colaux