Chantal Bietlot :: Art Site

Where others express their joys, their angers, their fears, their defeats, their victories, by cries, tears or laughter, I do transfer to the framework the felt emotion: By the choice of a music which makes vibrate in me sensitive cords, "classical music" or operas, in a kind of auditive association, I see emerging from me the old dreams, the memories hidden at the bottom of my memory, the stories, the words, the poems... Tenderness, trouble, agitation, all these vibrations are then retranscribed on the canvas by traces, lines, forms, and colors which reflect my mood: soft and warm for the melancholy, harder, darker for the anguishes and concerns, colder for the revolt and the discomfort. All is blend one in the other by swinging of flows in rhythms...


But this work is not achieved in a rational, linear way! It often happens that my inspiration loses the thread of the music and changes course at the mercy of a sudden anguish, of an uncontrollable pain, whose intensity has of equal only brutality. Painting then becomes a struggle against an underhand enemy who grounds at the bottom of me and drives me out of the framework. Then, I am consumed by the desire of giving up, the spleen, the fear of not achieving to express what I repress in me... And I find myself small fragile girl, doubting herself, divided between the fear of not being recognized and of not being understood by the others, and the inability to assume loneliness... Do I lock up or do I burst? Then, because I remain sincere, because I do not force things, there is that my hand find the gesture which guides the brush, there is that my ear listens the message of the music again. And gradually, I return to the canvas, and quietness comes back to me. Painting is sovereign for my balance and my anxious nature.

Painting is to some extent my privileged person I am speaking to, the one who holds the monopoly, the exclusiveness of my secret gardens. It is at the same time the patient receptacle, capable of a listening none to another equal and the revealing one expressing, exteriorizing, the most intimate share my being. There is all the paradox: here at to the moment when I sink in the depths of my unconscious, in a process of total interiority (because I speak only with myself), the canvas, become painting throughout this monologue, exposes without any finery and masks, my intimate being at the eyes of all. And taken up again by other eyes, my way changes, becoming unique for each one, either in symbiosis with me, and my feeling is amplified, or either reflecting them to themselves, and the painting becomes their mirror. As the opposite of the media incursions into private life, the painting reveals my intimacy but does not exhibe it...


Talks collected by Andree Desmet