After an exhibition in the Galerie Darial in Paris, Guy Prévan was to write :
« Giving northern shapes and colours to silence, this is what seizes us immediately in the work of Denise Lioté […] Georges de la Tour would have given up any candle flame in exchange for a laser beam. From this lesson she has understood her own quest to find unaltered the most secret combinations of the solar spectrum […] Where is the flaw ? She shows it to us. She is focal point and broken surface. She is both window and bridge. She is the dawn and the sound barrier traversed by Icarus rising beyond all gravity. She is above all sun particles. »
Here is the latest achievement of Denise Lioté : one which immediately attracts our attention ; its mystery moves us and carries us off into curved spaces, into the interlinked planes, the fall of lines. It is through these that we see those great stretches of solitude as they develop and impose their outline, and the mute blueprints of some future galaxy in which the ultra-violet and the vibrations of silence will reverberate and multiply. »
Guy Prévan, La Quinzaine Littéraire (The fortnightly literature review), Nov. 15 1983
Denise Lioté "Landscapist of the unknown spaces" (extract)
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« Mystery and limpidity of works dazzling by their multiple lights, from the brightest to the most diffuse, a fluorescent object still vibrating, each shade measured in the filter of the gold seeker or the jeweller of the stars, delicately graded by its two plateaux wrapped like chrysalids, all hanging from a beam, a stroke of charcoal, by the gossamer threads of a summer morn between the oatgrass and the May.
In the spirals of the bow, the harp, the windmill, the pavane, the shores rustling like wings when evening falls, the shadows shed by wisteria and St John’s wort, in all the Zabriskie Points, are sought all beginnings, echoing stridencies, lost noons, amber reflexions on snow, dawn at sea, dunes reminiscent of lavender, à hint of moon, as if in the valley of the hollyhocks. »
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Guy Prévan, l’Oeil du Griffon (The Eye of the Griffin) 1991