Quand le vent tourne nos pages, 2024

Yolaine Wuest  

Canvas by Yolaine Wuest, title: When the wind turns our pages, Charcoal and oil on canvas, 2024, 80 cm x 80 cm

Yolaine Wuest's universe is a language of silence and light, a deep whisper that moves us. Between a prose made of shadows and brilliant verses, there are passages, raw or delicately melted. These interstices, which Yolaine Wuest models in oil, play like a subtle dance between rigor and freedom.

The act of painting often begins with a charcoal trace, a first encounter with the support. "It is an initial trace that will transform, will dilute, will allow and take the work into painting. Nothing is fixed. It is the vector of what will follow until perhaps disappearing, even if it means losing myself a little." This initial line, hesitant but promising, sometimes disappears in the process, but it remains essential. It is a dialogue, a way of appreciating each other, the support and her. Then come the brushes, the rag, the gestures that sculpt the oil, that dig passages between shadow and light. Everything is research, trial and error, until Yolaine Wuest manages to bring the oil "alive in perpetual intertwinings." Each gesture of the brush or rag is a quest, a search in the material to extract the very essence of the living, the vibrant, the fragile. She sculpts, not in thickness, but in depth, seeking purity.

It is not a question of juxtaposing emotions or ideas, but of intertwining them, of merging them in a pictorial density that touches the authentic. Yolaine seeks, in each canvas, to make perceptible what makes vibrate, what moves and reveals our humanity. Shadow and light meet there like two souls that respond to each other.

In this subtle dialogue, the passages between shadow and light take on capital importance. It is these, these moving zones, that give life to her paintings. She shapes them with patience, with a brush or a cloth, almost as one would knead clay. For Yolaine, oil is a living, sensual, sometimes recalcitrant, but essential material. She admits her inability to work with acrylic, too fast, too inflexible Oil, with its slowness and demands, allows her to dilute, to dig, to sculpt. "It's visceral, I like this idea of the maneuverability, the sensuality of oil, despite the constraints that it induces; the smell of the mediums, the drying time, long! I have tried to work with acrylic again but it's too frustrating, impossible to play by searching with the color that dries too quickly." It is not a surface that she invests, but a depth.

When she works on tracing paper, a reversal occurs. The flashes of light, usual in her work, become more subtle and the dark gains in delicacy. These fragments evoke another form of expression, but bear Yolaine's signature: a fragile balance between density and lightness.

And when the lines end up speaking to each other, when the canvas, the tracing paper or the paper finds its voice, Yolaine knows that she has reached what she was looking for: a truth. "I like to go all the way to total purity, when everything is said in so little. A hollowed line can take so much time to speak correctly. So when they end up speaking to each other, it's so good..."

Her chromatic choices demonstrate an assumed radicalism. Black, white, and these passages between the two. A deliberately restricted range that, far from limiting her expression, increases its strength tenfold. The contrasts she explores are not oppositions, but complementarities. Shadow calls for light, and light responds to shadow, in a cycle where softness and strength coexist. Her works then become fields of purification, where every detail counts, where every line carries a truth.

When a work is completed, she must find the words to name it. Not for the sake of precision, but to offer a key, a gateway to the viewer. These titles are born from the words that have accompanied her throughout her creative process. Without them, she would feel a void, a form of incompleteness. But once the words are found, the work becomes inhabited, ready to meet the other, ready to be welcomed.