by Christian NOORBERGEN, art critic and curator – 03/14/2015
Evelyne Huet’s imaginative/ imagining portraits of incredible proximity, expand in space and stun the eye. They look like masks of humanity, emerged from all ages, miraculously originating from all known worlds, and born out of yesterday and today’s cultures. They look like effigies crafted from the inside by the arts of Asia, Oceania or Africa. They look like the faces of an ultimate truth that is still to come. Yet, even more so, these imaginary portraits and bodies speak of the secret and human presence of the greatest otherness. The reign of incandescence.
Labyrinths of signs make a sacral appearance and colors of richness, blunt and unusual, captivate the vastness, when the vastness itself is nothing more than an endless head, forever in the end inhabitable… Each face is an island. Each face never forgotten. Unthinkable figure, pure and palpable, on the inside-out. The power of the unfinished in all the possibilities of man…The head and the body make the top and the bottom of these landscapes of existence.
The implacable frontality imposed by Evelyne Huet creates a fabulous face-to-face between the work as mirror and the viewer’s intimate space. Everything has disappeared but the essential, and the decisive line, as if traced with a scalpel, injures space and creates it. The sovereign drawing and the bright color in an embrace, as they should be, in the scale of these powerful works. Few lines, grand drawing. Few colors, grand painting.
If there is harshness in the impact of art magnificently decanted, there is also tenderness and compassion for the precarious and fragile, ever-present and there is a bitter fight against the evil puppets of the world often in eye’s sight. Evelyne Huet’s engaged art dares to be pictorially active. The exorcism simmers, insidious and latent, under the controlled momentum of this tense, surprising and stripped chromatic space. These colors are intense and rare. They are not serving, they have a life of their own, and all the desired space to live it. They splash.
Evelyne Huet lives at the heart of a time without borders. A traveller, discreet, she is uninterested in the seductions of modernity. Her creation is not made of passing, artificial or seductive images. She reveals formidable stills, timeless and prodigious. A magical immobility illuminates each of her pieces. Her art is “charged” as a timeless talisman could be.
Infinite are the passages in the world of grand faces…
Christian Noorbergen
(Translated by Shawna Carroll)