Windows have always figured large in Geneviève Dael’s paintings of interiors, defining the spaces they puncture and illuminate. But as her approach has evolved, their role has changed correspondingly, never more intriguingly than in the present sequence of canvases, forming the French artist’s eighth exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery.

Through Dael’s windows there filters, into sometimes intimate, sometimes imposing spaces a soft, benign light. Where in earlier paintings windows were often opaque, now they are beginning to reveal another, outside world: branches of trees can be detected, even a glimpse of sunlit parkland beyond. ‘I give entire priority to feeling,’ Dael has commented, ‘never to the decorative’. The figures who occupy these rooms, relating to each other in ways we can only intuit, seem to be in the grip of strong emotions, turning the spaces themselves into metaphors for states of mind and feeling.

Increasingly for Dael, as the tenor of her work has progressed from creating settings expressive of  a climate of uncertainty, anxiety even, into a mood of serenity, the spaces she paints become sanctuaries rather than places of escape. There is no suggestion here of narrative, for she is strongly opposed to the notion of paintings with an agenda, preferring to share Mark Rothko’s view that ‘a picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer’. However, whatever calm the paintings may express seems as fragile as it is ephemeral. As Dael herself has commented, the silence enveloping these spaces may last no longer than the silence marking the interval between two movements in a musical composition. As the music resumes, the pattern will change, its shape already dimly prefigured in the silence which precedes it.

Something of the quietude of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s interiors has been noticed in Geneviève Dael’s paintings and the artist freely acknowledges her enthusiasm for certain aspects of the great Danish painter’s work. The dynamic of her own paintings, however, is a very different one. Much as Dael favours individual rooms as subjects, her compositions typically feature also corridors, entrance halls, bedrooms and anti-chambers, even an entire enfilade of rooms. These spaces are not static. Windows and doors often stand open, beckoning to their occupants.

While sharing the muted palette of much painting from the Danish fin de siècle, Dael’s newest work is marked by an abundant richness of detail – a resplendent chandelier, sculpted busts or moulded plasterwork, imposing columns, even water flowing smoothly as light into a basin. In these compositions characterised by their harmonious structure, there is sometimes a gentle humour, as in Narcisse importuné, in which a male figure of disarming innocence is surprised in front of a mirror or Fascination païenne, where a young girl gazes entranced into a light-filled room.

Where a more austere, Nordic space in evoked (as in the bedroom setting of Pressentiments), there may also be a playful dimension not un-reminiscent of certain of the earlier films of Ingmar Bergmann, such as Smiles of a Summer Night. In many of Dael’s compositions there is indeed a sense of theatre (or film) which leaves the viewer with a taste of hidden harmonies, once more bringing to mind an analogy from the world of music, for these harmonies we appreciate seem to resonate with the ripples of others just beyond the reach of our conscious senses.

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 for some twenty years by Francis Kyle Gallery and has held one-person exhibitions there in 1984, 1987, 1990, 1995, 1999 and 2003 and 2009.

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