Sensorial experience...

Plunging into the paintings of Barbara Dasnoy is a unique sensorial experience. The artist invites us to lose ourselves in the different spaces of her canvases. The lines, grids, transparencies, overlaps, interstices and play of layers transport us into the world of color and form.

This German born artist and graduate of ISBA (Institut supérieur des beaux-arts ) has lived in Besançon for many years and strives to transcribe her reminiscences and memories in her art. In the complex network of lines that enliven her compositions, memories become a real subject. The invisible takes form in color, in matter. It is perhaps this, what is meant by, in Paul Klee’s words, “to be abstract with memories”. But in the work of Barbara Dasnoy, the divide between abstraction and figuration is subtle. There’s a force in the design that is quite palpable. The importance of the stroke, the line and the immediateness of the design can be felt in each composition and encourages us to focus on an idea, a thought, an emotion, which the artist then records in the continuity of her pictorial field.

In this manner, Barbara Dasnoy allows us to seize the visible. The network that animates her paintings somehow reminds us of stained glass and the artist would appear to be searching for light and the play of transparency, which gives her work a spiritual force.

And what can be said of the color rendering, of the gestural dimension of Barbara Dasnoy’s work, which at times brings to mind the power of the abstract expressionism of Rothko? Like the American painter, Barbara invites us to undertake a stationary journey into the center of vibrating color, into the core of a sustained rhythm that transcends the majesty and mystery of her compositions. If at first glance the work of Barbara Dasnoy appears playful, it doesn’t take long for the eye to penetrate the grid and grasp something more complex, more lyrical. The artist searches the depths of her being and the revelations that she invites us to discover through the “sedimentation” of her strokes, unveil the mental landscapes of her work.

Nathalie Becker, August 2016