Not if you develop gills in the next five minutes
On the paintings of Louise Delanghe
You see the angle of the foot the humbleness of the horse the vibrance bursting at the image. Her layers of beginning again will explain the place of position — always lightness and weight, lightness and weight. Paint closes in on figures opening up on the sides breathing through gills in their costumes.
The blacks surrounding the greens compassing, full bleed with rounded edges and women in power in times of Orwell is it and shoes of a troubadour and clouds, complication and toes my God hands so thoroughly painted. I remember the air of the oil paint mixing with the open window’s sea salt coming in and our smoking breaths on the figures you painted — the hands we said and kept still bending to keep them at eye height. Long legs placards for your entertainment but this is more like the crust of the roasted meat the thick syrup in overheated plums— and then always the image decoded the movement a reference painted by numbers.
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Louise Delanghe mentions typing in, for example ‘Cowgirls in the heat of the battle’ on Google. Her paintings often build up from today’s relation to images, and irrevocably the internet’s effortless way of bringing together a snail, a parrot and a word like ‘Schnellspannmutter’ in a few cm2.
For these ‘Check-Mates’, her search engines read Russian depictions and board games. Painted in lacquer thick and shiny feels more than a sheer finish. Her UNO-like colour scheme, like a remedy to dullness, fires up a colourful brigade.
Spending the winter of 2020 in Ostend resurfaced memories of being a little girl visiting the vibrant though tacky folklore dance demonstrations in Koksijde. She was shaken by the way different cultures’ costumes and postures represent an attitude towards life at large. Seemingly random, these memories popped up, and colourful figures in costumes came to merge and embody image searches — with Russian figure painting; to end up in Velux Check-Mates. (text by Céline Mathieu)