ARPAÏS du Bois - Lettre d'amour

ARPAÏS du Bois builds an astonishing work around language. Not a work of composition or style, which would relate her to poetry, but truly a work within the language, in the very texture of the raw material it lives off and stages. A practice that she keeps anonymous, since she refuses to write in cursive letters. However, the suspension of meaning she likes to stage makes sense only in regard to her pictorial writing. The color material answers that of words, with gestures poking holes and punctuating her works, here creating a seemingly united background, there, a constellation of greys and reds. Like very few other artists, ARPAÏS du Bois investigates what we see, what hides under the surface of representation and locution. This recent work entitled Lettre d'amour plays on a tension between a tormented background with spurts of mute colors and the genuine words that evoke the purest -and overused- of feelings.Her work is both one of painting and writing.