Caroline Vicquenault

Caroline Vicquenault’s painting is populated with countless figures taken from her immediate surroundings. A number of pets are also featured amidst this close personal pantheon of women and men. The artist creates these portraits through a long, painstaking process, as she strives to not only capture each of her models’ expressions as best she can, but also to transport them into phantasmagorical settings. Their faces and bodies are set within sweeps of colour free of any motif, on living surfaces where the paint is left to fully experiment with itself. A subtle balance comes into play, in which masterful portraiture is met with the unexpectedness of backgrounds that spill over to the point of sometimes covering up the figures themselves. Caroline Vicquenault’s painting, whether oil on canvas or on paper, works simultaneously on figuration and abstraction, with each of these aspects serving the other in constant to-and-froing.