Françoise Cardinaux, visual artist
Presentation of the artist.
Psychoanalyst and visual artist, Françoise Cardinaux has an artistic career that began at Saint-Luc in the painting-art of the image section and at the Van Der Kelen Institute in decorative art.
She is also a filmmaker, author of two short films. A third film is currently in preparation. In the artistic field, she has teaching experience and several exhibitions in Belgium.
Description of the artistic work.
My painting questions emptiness, disappearance, nothingness, the search for oneself, the idea of finitude and the fullness of meaning. Anguish and serenity compete for the expression of the line and invade stripped-down characters. In their solitude, these cathartic characters teach us not to be alone. There is no need to hear them speak since thoughts are expressed in diaphanous letters.
My painting seeks to be a reading that would become vision. She wants to remind us that despair keeps us alive. She is also exhibited on various sites.
Wild women.
These portraits were created during tragic times (serious illness, external disaster, pandemic, confinement, mourning, etc.). They express the doubts, fears and anxieties of the people who accepted the mirror held up to them. My models welcomed the deformation as well as the transformation of their expressions through my own reading.
These portraits were painted in a time of loss of individual or collective bearings. Faced with a world that begins to waver, as always when a destructive event arises, a war, a revolution, an epidemic, everyone positions themselves according to their desire, their history, their subjective structure, their way of dealing with the world since they entered it.
These are the expressions of a vertigo experienced when life hangs by a thread.
They seek an answer to these existential questions of which the year 2020
cruelly reminds us of the current situation. They draw on a psychoanalytic approach but want to go beyond the pessimism of Freud who reduced art to a "light narcosis" and wrote that "a simple retreat from the harsh necessities of life, it is not deep enough to make us forget our real misery."
For me, the challenge is not to forget but to express and overcome our anxieties.