Charlotte Beaudry

Charlotte Beaudry's iconography confirms this impression of work dealing with a certain disquiet or malaise and its various manifestations. If we quickly leaf through the catalogue of the objects painted, we notice that she has chosen to represent deserted places, lost objects, people who are masked or who have even disappeared. This indicates a rather difficult relationship to the world where silence and solitude bear heavily, where undischarged violence is revealed. It is thus rather a tension, also in the sense of suspense, that is the vehicle for an iconography made especially of objects that are fastened or “buckled” (belts, padlocks, helmets, masks, etc.) or of characters subjected to or submitting themselves to games of tension and prohibition. But most importantly, Charlotte Beaudry's painting, while it tells us what it does, i.e. putting the figures under physical and psychological constraint, achieves so by means that are her own: stretching the colour and the confinement (or partitioning) of the lines. The most striking example of this dialectical coherence is the large portrait of a girl with a hidden face who strectches her pullover until it covers almost the entire surface of the canvas. As we see, this brief description of the picture is enough to understand the equivalence is thus established between the subject and the painting, between the “painted” subject and the “painting” subject, between “pull-over” and “all-over”, the stretching of the colour or of the canvas, standing for the stretching of the garment or the skin. All of this allows us to express the hypothesis that Charlotte Beaudry's painting might after all be a figurative metaphor for the act of painting itself.

Denis Gielen