Liliane Dardot's paintings invite you to take your time. Like nature itself that gives it theme and matter, it is a painting that gradually settles, in its apparently austere conformation, but which, in the end, blossoms into a celebration of form and color. It is a painting that takes time, in precise seasons - from preparation, sowing, ripening, to harvest - as actions, real events and not metaphors. They are complicit acts of time, translations of desires and expectations, resolutions and expectations: from the project, the preparation of the canvas, the collection of pictorial materials, to the launch or transcreation of forms seized from nature.
Paints, earths, pigments are prepared and used as literal fertilizers to make the forms flourish. Matter has its time of action, of decantation, of impregnation, of its maturation, in the almost microscopic transformation carried out by the sedimentation of these mixtures, until, finally, it is possible to harvest with the eyes (and with the hands) this precious harvest to which gives the name of the painting.
There is a new meaning to this painting, delicate and at the same time resolute, severe in its creation, touching in its silence full of subtle rumors, just as we hear in the real nature that motivates it.
It is not "landscape painting" in the sense of genre, but a painting that touches on nature and elements of nature in effigy - flowers, fruits, branches, trees, seeds, forests, valleys, planes, lights, shadows, fog, layers of air, puffs. If these elements are to a certain extent perceptible, they are more than representations, they are conduits of a line of interest, a construct of evocations (in the words of Arthur Alain Feinnes) through which we become receptive to so many other questions sown there, questions that are essentially of language and the language of painting. In this painting so full of refinements, there is something about time, doing and enjoying. It is constructive, in a different sense from geometric planar painting.
Its constructiveness is deliberate in the temporal dimension, when the execution time internalizes a game of co-incidences, which enables the apprehension of optical facts, to the extent of the observer's displacement, in the same way as differences in light (intensity, wave, quality of color, opacity and brightness) equally produce different perceptions, veiling and unveiling, accentuating and revealing plastic events (images, textures, colors), mysteriously engendered within the space.
Thus, the painting proposes a longer and more concentrated time of enjoyment. “Aspects such as changes in incident light throughout the day, or the viewer's own displacement in relation to the frame, can lead to some discoveries arising from different degrees of visibility.”
These possibilities make the observer a performer: reading becomes a physical, mental and poetically active act.
With this, the painted canvas becomes a place for the practice of subtleties, perceptual refinements, in the same way as it is for the artist: a flowerbed in which the form decants, where the refined residues of matter rest in silence, this silence full of meanings, that makes the fruits of the earth germinate. From painting.
