If you look at the painting of Chantal De Deken, you will first of all see a constant coloured play of lines, often vertical, diligently rhythmic, endowed with a great regularity, though they are not drawn with dead precision.

You could compare those lines with the warp in weaving, ready to receive the weft [trame], or else with a musical staff on which the score will be written: the artist just calls them a grid. Through their journey, those lines almost simultaneously undergo one or more transformations, a process visible to the eye which seems to suspend time.

That is where the word ‘framework’ [trame], in the theatrical meaning of the word, could also come to make sense, and command one’s attention, in referring to the painting of Chantal De Deken.

Classical French theatre is characterised by the rule of the three unities, unity of place, of time, of action, the latter also called ‘unity of peril’.

Those three elements are to be found here, in particular that of action, which is one of exploration, where the controlled mutation takes place, where painting and mediums bind and change, taking advantage of the element of chance, in other words the element of life, which we will be able to continue contemplating when everything is stabilised and fixed on the canvas.

(Translation: Philippe Hunt)

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