Loft and decoration (site and magazine, 2021/2022)

By inheriting her father's paint box, Chantal Dufour never imagined that she would find there the source of a lifelong passion. This box makes him discover paths of expression where the paths of creation and freedom intersect. Having initially invested in works on paper, in Indian ink or felt, she quickly turned to another medium, canvas, and liked to use acrylic.

In all spontaneity, Chantal Dufour travels through her imagination and places it on her canvases. She relies on her intuition to undertake an abstract exploration punctuated by lines, geometric shapes, stains and a palette of primary shades. Its colors which are at the origin of all the shades of the world echo its childhood, come to play with the light by means of a dazzling white background. While some of his themes are linked to personal memories, the questioning gazes reflected in many of his works confront us with our own surprise at being in the world and our questions about the meaning of life. But it is always by means of a poetic expression crossing refined forms and symbols that the artist approaches subjects as diverse as the place of science in the world, human rights or freedom of expression. The visual artist then mixes materials in the service of a free creative expression to deal with universal themes, where the very question prevails over the answer.

Collage, painting, ink and relief welcome our gaze when it comes to rest on the works of Chantal Dufour. It's not just an observation, it's an exploration, a questioning, a subject that leads to debate. Between asexual faces, committed canvases and colorful compositions, the artist's creativity immerses us in a universe made of shapes, characters and freedom! An inspiring moment of reflection that binds us to the artist.

Loft et Decoration (V.G)

Viviane Georget (Loft and Decoration)

Reviews

2016 C. Critiks

The poetic alchemy of Chantal Dufour

Her taste for the materiality of the support, the color, the vibration of lines and shapes, reveals the alchemy of a potential that is both symbolic and abstract.

Fascinated by the frescoes of cave art, walls painted and damaged by time like those of Pompeii, the artist seeks a relief effect by working certain canvases to assemble different elements such as sand, sawdust, paper. silk, cardboard, plastic or even electronic circuits, then cover them with white. After this first step, a simple and sinuous line is born inspired by the irregular surface. Color comes next.

“The distant vision of the painting interests me by the overall movement that emerges from it, like a geographical map. "

Her works are constructed according to a logical process, almost by themselves and can be seen as arithmetic structures, abstract games of the mind. “The simple and pure line and the mathematical writings have for me a formal beauty and keep a certain mystery. "

Between deduction and vision, Chantal Dufour develops a rhythmic research from materials, shapes, colors and light.

“The decomposition of white light into a spectrum of vivid colors captivates me. "

The search for harmony and balance is also expressed through figurative elements. The omnipresent face punctuates her work. Through the human figure time passes, that of History and that of her own life. “Asexual, young, internalized”, her faces are often those of children and adolescents, but are also inspired by the hieratic totems of ancient civilizations or are influenced by Romanesque and Renaissance works.

The bird is the second recurring element, a symbol of freedom that has helped her grow and emancipate herself.

Through these two figurative elements, her works paradoxically become abstract and produce multiple meanings. Sometimes a particular face or a bird constitutes the central theme of a painting. Other works in seriality are based on the accumulation of these fundamental pieces nested in a cohort that can seem infinite, according to a scheme where the viewer himself is invited to take his place.

“By abstraction, by the linking of shapes and ideas according to an art of reasoning which proceeds from the same playful spirit as the assembly of a puzzle, we can conceive of ourselves as part of a Whole."

Her pictorial approach and her questioning of reality reside in this systemic device. Based on the principles of sequences and repetitions, it generates multiple variations and very diverse results. Differences as perceptible as they are invisible build a well-argued work, filled with poetry: a marvelous and never out of date world, which speaks, whispers and questions.

Canoline Critiks, art critic (March 2016)

1993 New-York 1

Montserrat Gallery - New-York

September 1993 - ARTSPEAK

Chantal Dufour is an artist who goes out on a limb, drawing upon the directness of Art Brut to create paintings that touch a raw emotional nerve. Like Victor Brauner and Jean Dubuffet, Chantal Dufour invests the human head with an unearthly quality that speaks of the inner man rather than the outer mask one presents to society. Chantal’s heads have big expressive eyes that can project untold joy or unspeakable pain — or perhaps both simultaneously. Perhaps these faces are telling us that one of the secrets of life is learning how to be happy and miserable at the same time.

In any case, Dufour’s heads, at once whimsical and horrific, cast a powerful spell. They are strongly painted, with thick areas of pigment and various col lage elements to enhance their textural interest. Chantal Dufour is an artist who holds up a special distorting mirror to the viewer, inviting him or her to take a long honest look at the inner man or woman and perhaps make peace with the existential pain of living. Her paintings are very special indeed.

Claude LeSuer

Critique de Canoline Critiks (2016)

MUTATIONS ("Ateliers d'Artistes", Edit. Regards, 1998)

Blue, here deep and light there, the wave invades the lower part, deposits on the shore of the sediments of a worked material where some electronic circuit / shell runs aground, and nonchalantly spreads out in a nautical basin which forms a violin. Black, a line crosses this sea, but its sinuosity makes apparent concession to the picturesque only to delimit silhouettes with astonished or worried glances. Do you think you see a red flower or, like a kite, a double helix in the air? They are in fact images of fundamental molecules of life. And with the eye drawn to space, a massive tower is imposed: at the same time an observatory from which a stone Janus gauges the world in light and shadow and a prison tower which freezes it itself in its enclosures. .

Christian Bidard

1998 Mutations