Biography

Genevieve Dael was born in Paris in 1947 and brought up in a literary and artistic milieu in the sixteenth arrondissement. She was convent-educated and went on to study decorative arts at the Ecole Charpentier. In the early 1970s she lived briefly in London. Returning to Paris, she taught herself to paint in oils, with no previous training. Her first paintings concentrated on trompe l'oeil experiments, then she developed an interest in extinct and imaginary creatures after encountering the work of the nineteenth century Austrian fantasist, Alois Zotl. Alongside her interest in the poets Lautréamont and Edgar Poe, favourites of the surrealists, she discovered the satirical work of Grandville. Genevieve Dael has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1983 and has participated in the Gallery's theme exhibitions, The Art of Memory: Contemporary Painters in search of Marcel Proust (2000), which received a second showing at the National Theatre in 2001; Roma (2003), Lair of The Leopard: Twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily (2005) and Everyone Sang:A view of Siegfried Sassoon and His World by twenty-five painters today (2006). One-person exhibitions in 1984, 1987, 1990, 1995, 1999, 2003 and 2005.

Genevieve Dael

The French painter Genevieve Dael inhabits her sombre, expressive interiors, with figures, mostly female, wrapped in thought and typically illuminated by a wan evening or dawn light.

'My ideal viewer, if there is one,' observes Dael, 'is someone who responds to my paintings rather as a music buff treasures those moments of silence which punctuate every composition.' Just as such moments resonate with a sound that has ceased but also prepare the listener for what is to come, so Dael's paintings have their being, we feel, in a space in-between, before or after some significant event or perception. On their surface flowing and melodious, these are paintings which derive much of their strength and character beyond this calm from elements of tension or uncertainty embodied in the figures who inhabit her spaces. What seems clear is that no narrative is intended, for these captured moments, the bubbles of silence, in half-imaginary settings are essentially visual metaphors for inner states of mind.

Light, so pivotal a feature in Dael's interiors, filters through heavy curtains as it sheds more benign, if still cool rays. These spaces now offer their occupants not confinement or protection from a world perceived as threatening but rather solace and sanctuary, a place to nurture a new reflectiveness and calm.

In Dael's interiors, inhabited not only by still figures but with an equal weight their thoughts, memories and dreams, which have an almost tangible presence, there is a hint of the world of James McNeill Whistler with his restricted palette and typically exquisite placing of every element in the composition. There may come to mind, too, the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi who shared a preference for greys, creams and blacks, painting his surfaces so finely they seem free of brushwork, while his atmospheric subjects look back in their turn to the quiet mastery of Vermeer, connoisseur of half-lit figures not quite communicating in intimate spaces. Dael herself has spoken of her fascination with baroque sculpture and with the paintings of Caravaggio. Finally, however, it is her own voice, a blending of 'perfect clarity and complete mystery' (John Russell Taylor) which comes across unmistakably in this latest, most resolved body of paintings.

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