Hommes arbres - Paysage imaginaire, Circa 2024

Danielle Lamaison  

Danielle Lamaison: Pierce the surface of the painting

To the hurried or distracted viewer, many of Danielle Lamaison's paintings may seem abstract. A gestural abstraction where we find ourselves carried away by waves of colors and torrents of materials. Those of watercolor and acrylic that she mixes to create an animated painting from the fluidity of one and the hardness of the other.

But there is something to see beyond this apparent abstraction. Indeed, we are called upon to immerse ourselves in this painting, to “return to the surface of the canvas" to discover there, behind the shapes and colors, figurative motifs. We then perceive faces and bodies, but also insects, flowers or the dancing reflections of water. A whole world that merges and emerges from a painting where various influences mix, ranging from the Byzantine icon to the Japanese print. Unless it's the other way around. It is then from the explosion of figures and bodies that the painting is made, like a transfiguration of the visible world into a material made of images and stories that she draws, paints, but also pierces, weaves and embroiders. . The canvas thus becomes for Danielle Lamaison a space of appearances and inlays where she brings together the evocative power of painting and the materiality of embroidery. Like two complementary ways of piercing the painting which no longer becomes a flat surface, but a territory to be explored by the image and by the needle.

Danielle Lamaison is then like Penelope in Homer's Odyssey. An inspired storyteller who paints and weaves new stories every day to push back reality, and give dreams a chance to enchant the world. An artist who retains a taste for travel and discovery from her childhood as a soldier's daughter, she who now walks the paths of the imagination and invites us to get lost in them with her.