During the elaboration of Blondes…, a long series of line drawings was made. Often they evoke the figure of a dancer, or of a creature of an unknown order. Dancer and beings –the difference is not always clear— are in movement. Their body can assume various forms : it expands, it condensates, it is in continuous metamorphosis. Its multifarious character is not a play of forms. The figures are the graphic sediment –rapid, often in one single stroke of the pen– of the psychocorporeal energy : energy of one ephemeral fraction of the dance and of its experience. The drawings evoke a state of being, linked to one moment. There is no clear development. Drawing, like dancing, is a non-ending human condition.
 Here, the dancing existence takes shape : not through an outsider who observes the dancer, but through the dancing body, gifted with the talent to translate itself in a plastic way. In their bare essentials, these drawings involuntary recall Eastern Zen calligraphy or pictorial brush work. They do not strive for a representational aesthetics but for seizing an existential energy, as volatile as intense : the intensity of full presence, which is also aspired at in butoh spirit. Their beauty lies in this almost impossible grasping of the elusive, like a once traced dance movement is as Pé started to explore this energy pictorially. Her first paintings seem to await the uncertain and the unpredictable. Like in her dance, Pé avoids everything that inclines to pathos; the colors are sober. Some paintings are analogous to the drawings : light, white, etheric, sharp, subtle, flashing, oniric. They reveal energetic structures of which the body is only one manifestation. It interacts with bodies or, better, energies of unknown nature and unclear provenance, experienced through an extreme sensitivity. Like in her dance, these paintings conjure up a multiform energy, welling up from the layered inner tissues.

For the installation ‘Dirty elphins’, Pé forced herself to paint only in the difficult and ‘ugly’ colors of green, brown, white, and grey. These ‘elves’ (pixies, sprites) are the indirect result of her dance training in Japan, whose nature and magic she was, when creating this installation work, profoundly missing. Blindfold sensibility walks lay a the basis of her dance work and invite the participant to look for healing and therapy in nature and to enjoy it in a joyfully ‘dirty and courageous’ way. These ‘pixies’ –their nature remains indistinct—reveal an equally indistinct way of being, in inner change for aye, blurring the zones of spirits, earth, plants, humans and other, abstract entities. They are square to contemporary angst of the uncontrollable and of contagion, of wriggling and writhing life.

Since summer 2012 She is working on a new series of paintings in which she tries to find out how to transform the drawings in a more layered, tangible way into paintings. The characteristic, sharp line of the drawings disappears and perishes in the absorbing matter. The compositions she develops are still ‘tenuous’ and transparent. They stand close to the notion of dilating skin, to a blurring of borders. The canvas is prepared with thick layers. Thereafter, she use tubes with a sometimes brightly colored paint as a pen, squeezing the pigment out. This results in a relief line disappearing into the manipulated surface of the canvas or sprouting out of it. By scratching with and within clear contours this new series also reminds traces of scars, scarifications or tattoos, carved in the skin, betraying the desire to be erased. Or to (re)appear through manifold, shimmering epiphanies ?

Paul Vandenbroeck.