Ancrages
Opening night: 30.04.2026 at 6pm
2.05.2026 > 4.04.2027
Did Danièle Lemaire (1939–2025) come from another planet as people often say about socalled “fragile” artists, to get them off the hook from understanding and perceiving them? How can we believe or want them to be free of roots, history or culture, thus reduced to nothing more than the narrow limitations of a fantasized otherness? Danièle Lemaire’s work, on the contrary—as with any artist—is enriched by the worlds she passed through: by influences, impressions, exchanges, memories, and stories that are both overt and hidden, spoken and unspoken through the act of painting. In her appearance and painting, she followed in the footsteps of her mother, Hélène Locoge (1915–2005), with whom she lived until the age of thirty; the long immersion in artwork and in people; the mother’s studio and the family home where artists from Hainaut would gather—Louis Buisseret, Albert Ludé, Achille Chavée, and many others—encompassing figuration, surrealism, and abstraction. There are subtle yet unmistakable resonances between the works of mother and daughter, which this exhibition brings to light. Midway through her career, Hélène Locoge—known primarily as a portraitist—moved away from figuration and threw herself passionately into abstraction. Her daughter didn’t display such a rupture with the project of painting, rather, during the thirty years she spent at the Ateliers du 94 in La Louvière, a form of indeterminacy emerged—a deliberate blurring between figuration and abstraction—that gave the work its distinctive style and poetic quality, its silent philosophy. Human or animal faces, landscapes, and undisciplined bodies are set free by lines and colours—by an excess of strokes of black ink over the nonchalant yet powerful organisation of materials, shapes, and hues. Danièle Lemaire’s faces and bodies become landscapes: no longer a swinging door toward an interiority that confines them, but toward an exteriority that calls to us, looks back at us, and binds us to it. They synthesize and transcend the contrasting paths previously taken by her mother with such grace and assurance!
