by John AUSTIN, an art writer living and working in Manhattan (May, 2017)
Evelyne Huet stresses fragmentation, sequencing and pacing in her bold digital compositions on paper and plexiglass. Using defused colors and tonal gradations with sensitive skill the artist beckons the beholder to enter into private realms which co-exist, almost as parallel universes, within the same picture plane. The artist’s world is filled with floating organic passages related to figurative forms.
Huet has many references in her work. They include the hallucinatory stillness of voided areas and closed spaces of Rene Magritte and the tensional jagged spaces of Clifford Still. These combined to present a conflicted irrational and submerged world reflective of opposing realities.
However, Evelyne Huet is a 21st century artist with intimations of Romanticism and Symbolism which imbues her work. She includes biomorphic schematics which are meant to evoke psychic or naturalistic worlds and references. What is particularly arresting is Evelyne Huet’s capacity to draw out from her work a sense of metaphysical sublimity. The crepuscular light, the juxtapositions of colors and intimations of crevices and haunting negative spaces (true doorways into the unconscious) in her work give it a richly ambivalent effect. As all great visual work, her compositions are often invested in contrarieties and spatial conundrums.
Many of the works’ finest passages are triggered by the artist’s uncanny use of oppositional techniques. Her compositions include organized marks and grids used often as structure to pattern formations alluvial, cellar patterns which reference both facial features as well as interior spacing within the human mind. Added to this are the artist’s allusions to series of complex alignments applied against backdrops, which recall defused patterns of stained glass.
Light is explored in two different ways. The first is its heterogeneous application, which allows parts of the picture plane to be illuminated fragment by fragment. This insinuates the breakdown of the world, which reveals itself as a lost totality in acts of perception, gradually, yet inexorably.
At the same time, the artist is in command of homogeneous light application, which seem to unite larger bodies of spaces, as large parts of an interlocking body which is driven forward to a unifying end. The result is the overall sensation, which suggests a great unity of space and time that is symmetrically and asymmetrically related. What makes Evelyne Huet’s work so vitalistic in effect and so dramatic, is her remarkable use of a visual language linked towards an apprehension of pre-logical thought as well as a suggestion that its commonality transfixes all levels of experience.