Edwige Fouvry: Ô temps, suspends ton vol !

Dolby Chadwick gallery is pleased to announce Ô temps, suspends ton vol !, an exhibition of new work by French-born artist Edwige Fouvry, on view April 7-30, 2016. French for “Oh Time, Stop Flying,” the exhibition title alludes to Alphonse de Martine’s 1820 poem ‘The Lake,’ a meditation on the constant passage of time. 

Although clearly embedded in a visual awareness of the physical world, Edwige Fouvry’s paintings are never made directly from life. Instead, they are complex syntheses wrought by her imagination. By knitting together childhood recollections, photographs old and new, the moving world seen from the windows of trains, stills harvested from the television set and other media, Fouvry pursues an “emotional truth” in which the recorded, the remembered, and the imagined must each play a role.

The evolution of Fouvry’s style since her days at Belgium’s prestigious La Cambre school has been, in a very important sense, a process of simplification. While she has added extensively to her repertoire over the years, she has at the same time gradually stripped from her work any affect that emphasizes concept over the viewer’s personal encounter with the work. Even the complexity of external narrative has been plucked away, leaving in its place the self-sufficiency, the immediacy, and the generous elasticity of poetry. Her art is a door through which she invites us to visit a deeply personal, deeply subjective, space, to have an experience that is far more sensual than notional, far more emotional than theoretical.