Corinne Malfreyt-Gatel

Everything in Corinne Malfreyt-Gatel’s practice is a story of energy and symbiosis. Her oil painting is composed of and marries the elements in a continually circular movement of the material, symbolic for the artist of time and the life cycle.

The series of paintings “Le Sacre après Pina”, a homage to dance and the famous German choreographer Pina Bausch, evokes the eternal return of things, disappearance to rebirth, completion to beginning again, through the movement of bodies.

Fascinated by the theatrical and performing nature of artistic creation, Corinne Malfreyt-Gatel produces alongside her pictorial production, public acts, poem readings to music or “live” paintings, precious moments during which the notion of exchange, emotions lived together and shared crystallise.

In this context, spring, which symbolises the eternal renewal, is a subject dear to the artist. The budding, the birth of flowers, the blooming of a young and strong nature, but also more metaphorically the birth of love, romantic displays, tender attempts to approach, dances of seduction, all make up the images and references that the artist draws upon.

Fortified by this display of feelings, Corinne Malfreyt-Gatel then works on the canvas to transform these moments in time by creating material effects – drips or thick paint in the background, adding grains of sand, marked pencil strokes – that come to delicately suggest silhouettes in dominant grey-blue to the image of the rebirth of the spring sky.