Helene Delmaire

My work looks to display strength through fragility; to explore man’s relationship to the natural world as a symbol of his own inner world. I do not paint people as individuals but as symbols of humankind - a mere element of the larger whole.
The subject is often swallowed or hidden by its pictural environment; truncated or erased with a swipe of the brush. The face and the eyes, the commonly named windows to the soul, are turned away or masked, turned towards an inner world that can never be wholly communicated to another, despite a shared depth. Paradoxically, the discovery of this inner world comes when personal identity is let go of. Through the loss of the personal comes the universal.
I want to give fragileness and so-called "feminine" elements such as flowers and pastel colours an intensity; to transform the infantilising cliches they have come to represent into something meaningful and powerful.
https://www.helenedelmaire.com