« Denise Lioté paints space and light. Nothing appears to happen in her canvases other than tension between colours. The silence stops us, suspends our gaze which further penetrates this shifting light. With the passing of the years, her painting has come more and more to reflect her personal ascesis always listening to the dream of fundamental elements, water, air, the infinite, weightlessness. Her brushwork aims at making us see these mysterious, intangible zones. Variations in light, shifting brought on by the colours, suggest volumes, opens up moving paths, digs wells. This can be explained by her perfect knowledge – traditional – of the shades from dark to light that she uses in her quest for a more advanced level of knowing. As the values pass from obscurity to transparency, so the tonalities subtlely play their tonal variations in perfect harmony : from grey-blue to a greyness suffused with red, from a salmon pink whiteness to an orange tinted white. Captive and fluid glimmers sweep the surface with their beam, like wakes in a journey into space leading to the inner world of Denise Lioté. In the silence and the light, suspended emotion and the quivering for an elusive reality tick by.»
Lydia HARAMBOURG,
Press Clipping Individual Exhibition, Maison Mansart.
La Gazette de l’Hôtel Drouot (Hôtel Drouot Gazette), May 1999.
« Like the poets to whon she was so close, as we already sensed, Denise Lioté involves herself in the «poetry of space» that Bachelard so much appreciated, to its sensorial equivalents, not through words but through colours whose luminous secrets she unveils. She weaves the subtle texture of space and light as she visualizes their movements, suggesting their chromatic vibrations through cunning superimpositions. In her evocation of these mysterious and elusive tremors, she has recourse to a simple range of colours, mainly bluish-grey, greys hinting of red, ochre and shades of rose, subtle whites, and their fluid combinations create the impression of an infinity of colour. This feeling of declining harmony, shifting between darkness and light, is accompanied by a sense of movement. The layered glimmerings combine to evoke spatial beings, presences who owe their quivering to the dense pictural texture. »
Lydia HARAMBOURG
La Gazette de l'Hôtel Drouot (Hôtel Drouot Gazette), Nov 2001.
Painting as light as painting
«This is an artist who has been painting light for very many years. The subject is simple but it always sparks her unending quest for a «poetic of space.» There is no redundancy here because we find ourselves simultaneously in the ephemeral and in the intuitive, observing a constantly modified aerial space. The borderline separating poetry from painting is very fragile in her case. Bachelard’s presence may be almost invisible; the internalized meditation of the Far-Eastern painters she questions cannot be separated from the plastic asceticism which leads her to refine her subject until all narrative associations are eliminated.
The shimmering colours before us take shape at a distance without ever suggesting the already known. A subtle play on the layering of colours encourages another world to emerge. A secret, dream reality glimpsed through uncertain shiftings caused by the light sending out planes of colour. And these serve as chromatic vibrations that provoke the birth of an imaginary reality. Shimmering lines fluctuate between the shade and the light and illuminate imperceptible nuances of a spread of pink, of blue, of ochre and white. The surface quivers, comes to life, moved by the light chromatic swell. The fluidity and the air are one, impalpable yet densely coloured under Denise Lioté’s brush. Before her painting, the cristals filled with mysterious water come to mind. »
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Lydia Harambourg
La Gazette de l’Hôtel Drouot (Hotel Drouot Gazette), 4 Juin 2004.