The artist behind the art: Anouk Antoine
Art is personal, but often there is a barrier between the public and the artist. This week, Belga English brings the creators to the reader in a series of four intimate interviews with female artists in Belgium.
The explosion of vibrant colours on her large scale canvases might raise questions concerning from where Anouk Antoine draws her inspiration. Having grown up with Antwerp’s characteristically grey skies, her imagery defies the monochrome colour palette of her surroundings with swaths of adventurous hues.
Her current exhibition Cadences Chromatiques in Varengeville-sur-Mer in the Normandy region of France, celebrated her colourful offerings to an eager public as the first Flemish artist programmed at Galerie EdouardM.
Artistic coincidences
Anouk's road to Galerie EdouardM is dotted with synchronicities. While travelling through Normandy years ago, she instantly felt what she describes as a “click” with the region. Having not booked accommodation for the evening, Anouk ran into a tea house attached to the gallery, asking for a recommendation for a place to stay.
“The owner of the tea house called a friend, and suddenly a yellow car appeared,” she recalls. “The woman used to run a bed and breakfast and said she would just put us up for the evening. No problem.”
Anouk Antoine was whisked to this stranger’s house, where she stayed up late into the night talking. The two remained friends, and Anouk Antoine is currently spending the summer in a house down the street from her, with her exhibition at that same gallery she passed by that night.
Anouk, who splits her time between Antwerp and Montreal, Canada, where her partner lives, shows her work in both places. She therefore found yet another amusing coincidence that the location of Galerie EdouardM is in Place des Canadiens.
Anouk had met the gallery owner on one of her subsequent trips to Varengeville-sur-Mer in 2022. When she showed him her paintings, he simply responded, “J’adore.” They set a date for her to exhibit her work, and after the COVID pandemic, she packed her paintings and drove from Antwerp to Varengeville-sur-Mer for the opening last month.
The final fortuitous moment for this particular expo was her last-minute decision to bring an unfinished painting with her to work on during her summer in Normandy. When she arrived and set up Cadences Chromatiques, the owner said he would need one more piece to complete the show. She mentioned the unfinished piece, which depicted a sun setting into the water. He asked her to have it ready for the opening. With the paint still wet, she hung it just before the doors opened, and it was unanimously the crowd’s favourite.
“The public was so enthusiastic,” Anouk Antoine says of the opening. As a Flemish artist exhibiting experimental contemporary art in a small, traditional town, she expected a few raised eyebrows and potential cultural bumps, but was met instead with a keen stream of visitors.
The need to create
Anouk Antoine was always drawing as a child. Her creativity dates back to some of her earliest memories. She recalled a moment after studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, while perusing a gallery with a friend , “There was a piece he returned to over and over,” she says. “I went home and created a piece as a birthday gift, pretending as a joke that I bought it in this fancy gallery. I had it framed and put a fake signature on it”.
Her friend was astounded by the artwork and thrilled to display it. Anouk Antoine realised she needed to confess that she had created the piece.
While Anouk Antoine impressed those around her with her penchant for capturing imagery, it wasn’t until 2016, when she saw an exhibition at the Groninger Museum and Museum de Fundatie featuring "Wilden" and "Nieuwe Wilden", works of 20th-century Expressionism period from Germany, that she felt she “needed” to create something bigger. “Something about those massive pieces…I knew I needed to start making large-scale works,” she says of the artworks whose characteristics hinge on uncompromising artistic freedom.
With large-scale works from the vibrant city of Berlin as a source of inspiration, it is not surprising that Anouk Antoine also found electronic music to be a useful stimulant while creating. “When I see scenes in nature that grab me and I think, 'I would like to do something with these colours', I get in my studio and paint to electronic music and am happy.” The name for her current expo, Cadences Chromatiques, is based on her love of the rhythm of electronic music.
"The fusion of vibrant colours and rhythmic beats creates an immersive sensory experience, elevating the act of creation to new heights. As the melodies weave through the air, they synchronise with my movements, guiding my hand across the canvas," she declares.
“Painting is freedom and happiness and joy"
With her dog Rubio at her side, Anouk Antoine delves into what she refers to as “controlled chaos”, placing the canvas on the floor so she can move around it. “I’m always continuing…building to find the tension,” she says of her process. “Once I arrive at the tension, I know it is ready.” However, she encounters moments where the puzzle is not complete and she needs “more”.
Her art, much like life, is a series of push and pull. There is an overarching dichotomy that defines these opposing forces. She describes this back and forth, saying, “In the delicate balance between freedom and societal directives, represented by those geometric forms, lies the essence of harmonious existence. While the concept of absolute freedom may tantalise the imagination, a world without guidelines from society would spiral into chaos, without safeguarding the well-being of all individuals.”
The canvases are her playground for this intriguing look at society. “Painting is freedom and happiness and joy, but the square canvas is like society,” she says. “People say they want to be free, but you cannot disconnect from everything. Painting in a square or rectangle shape is the wink I give to show we want to be free, yet cling to structure.”
Painting off the edge
Anouk Antoine alludes to the physical boundary reached at the end of the canvas. She still plays with the limits by letting her colours spill over the sides. “I can’t stand seeing artwork that ends when it meets the frame,” she states. “You see where the white starts, and it finishes the story without asking permission. The beautiful world stops.” Like an audience member taken out of the moment by glimpsing a technician or actor backstage, Anouk Antoine prefers to keep her viewers in a suspended reality.
Where she will not compromise her suspension of reality is in selling her works when the “energy does not match”. “You are giving a part of yourself when you sell your art,” Anouk Antoine shares. She had a wealthy man enter her shared atelier years ago and select a painting he wanted to buy. “You would think I would be happy that someone was buying a piece, but I lay awake all night and felt bad about it,” she recalls.
When the man returned the next day, he was instead taken with the photographs on display in the space. “He forgot all about my painting and wanted the work by the photographer I shared the studio with. I was so relieved!”
On commissions, Anouk Antoine has similar feelings, “Making and producing works are not the same,” she shares while fully acknowledging that it is not always possible to turn down these offers when living fully from artwork.
Now, once again situated in Varengeville-sur-Mer for the rest of the summer, she will oversee her current exhibition and take in her surroundings for upcoming works. “I’m so inspired by the colours here,” Anouk Antoine says of the same lush landscapes that inspired Claude Monet and Georges Braque in the 19th and 20th centuries.
This exhibition in the verdant seaside town has already garnered attention for a collaboration in Lisbon. With an ever-expanding oeuvre and locations to show her work around the globe, Anouk Antoine is living the way she paints: pulling the vision further beyond the edges of the canvas.
(MOH)
#FlandersNewsService | © PHOTO ANOUK ANTOINE
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