Lydie Arickx 
Presentation
In full control of her art, she is at ease with very large formats as well as in minute compositions. Lydie was made to contend with the bravest ; in this in fight, she lashes out her full-fledged energy in order to create a impulsive, brisk, lively painting in a emergency, a saving climactic fever.
Lydie Arickx : a few landmarks
Born in 1954, she exhibits since 1982, after her training at the Graphic art Institute. Supported by Dominique Polad-Hardouin which has repeatedly shown her work both in her gallery and in fairs and other venues, Lydie has participated in major international artistic events such as the Basel Art Fair and Art Paris. Works by Arickx have been acquired by major Institutions and Museums such as the Musée national d'Art moderne of Paris, Centre Pompidou, Tokyo Fine Art Museum. Both painter and sculptor, she has executed monumental works such as an 300 m2 affresco for the Créteil Hospital (1999); she has cast in bronze a 4x3 meter fountain, "Genesis" for the Lagnet Castle (2000). She has been awarded the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre National des Arts et Lettres.
Biography
Exhibitions
1982
Galerie Jean Briance, Paris
1983
Galerie Amaury Taittinger, New York
1986
Musée d'Art Contemporain, Dunkerque
FIAC: Galerie Jean Briance, Paris
1989
Carré des Arts du Parc Floral de Vincennes, Paris
Barcelona International Art Fair
1990
Foire de Bâle (Switzerland) Galerie Christine Colmant (Bruxelles)
Foire de Bâle (Switzerland) Galerie Oniris Barnoud (Dijon)
Galerie Lillebonne, Nancy
1998
Centre 2000, Arcachon
Château de Viaud, Lalande de Pomerol: fresque 25 m x 2,5 m
Couvent des Cordeliers, Paris: peintures, sculptures
Galerie Méduane: Laval
Pour le 800e anniversaire de la Jurade de Saint Emilion, exposition personnelle dans le cloître et, sur le thème de la crucifixion, dans l'Eglise Monolithe
2001
St'art 2001, Strasbourg
Chapelle des Carmes : Musée de Borda, Dax : "Tauromachie"
2003
Galerie idées d'artistes, Paris "Un genou en terre"
Musée Bonnat/Le Carré, Job, "Un genou en terre"
Basilique Saint Jean, Troye : "Les descentes de croix"
Plaza Conde de Rodezno, Peintures et sculptures : Pamplona, Espagne
MAC-ModernArtCenter-Fondation Rustin , Anvers : "Arickx-Nitkowski-Rustin"
2004
Chapelle Saint Jacques , Vendôme : "Mémoires du corps"
2005
Galerie idées d'artistes , "Etat de Grâce"
Art Paris : Carrousel du Louvre, Paris
Musée d’art Contemporain, Chauvigny Les Bains Douches : "La Nativité"
Collégiale de Chauvigny : "Paysages et Spiritualité"
Galerie Grand’Rue, Poitiers
2006
Galerie Meyer Le Bihan, Paris
Galerie idées d’artistes, Paris : "Il n’y a de repos pour personne"
2007
Galerie Polad-Hardouin : "Intranquille Amour"
Public collections
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris
Musée de Dôle
Musée de Dunkerque
Fonds national d'art contemporain, La Défense
Musée de Carcassonne
Musée de Tokyo (Japon)
Centre Pompidou : accrochage organisé par Christian Boltanski des
collections du Cabinet d'arts graphiques, acquisitions 1977-98
Dernières commandes d'œuvres monumentales :
1993 Fresco 30 x 3,5 m for the hall of the Hospital Paul Brousse
(Prof. Henry Bismuth), Villejuif
1994 "Bacchanales" fresco 9 x 3 m for the wine storehouses of the Castle Lagnet
(Hélène Levieux-Leclerc)
1995 Decoration of the ceiling of the wine storehouses of the Castle Lagnet (Hélène Levieux-Leclerc)
1999 Maternité, Realization of a fresco of 300 m2, for the Maternity of the Hospital of Créteil (Prof. Bernard Paniel)
1999 Alma mater, command of the IUFM of Mont de Marsan for a monumental sculpture in polite concrete of 5m height.
1999 "L'homme qui marche", bronze monumental statue of 3 m height.
2000 "La Genèse", bronze monumental fountain 4m x 3m, for the Castle Lagnet, (Hélène Levieux-Leclerc)
2003 "Le tronc commun", concrete monumental sculpture of 7 m. height, for the fifty years of the manufactory FP Bois in Mimizan
Lydie Arickx is Knight of the National Order of the Arts and Letters.
Free speech
Press
“ Etat de grâce” (State of grace) Is it necessary that life is tested, that the body falls, that tiredness is transformed into extenuation so that work remains in an excess of energy ? That it is renewed, against life or alongside it, which takes shape in its fractures and its chaos? One can ask this question regarding the recent works on paper by Lydie Arickx whose preceding exhibition was called, not only symbolically, “Un genou en terre” (“grounded knee”). In her studio in Saint-Geours-en-Maremnes, there are piles of drawings, thrown one on the other, like fragile skins, amalgamated pages of hardly-dry oil pastels, a graphic and autobiographical diary of drawings, written under the impulse and the drastic desire to register order, a readable truth and an obligation to resist a lapse of memory. An impulse that Lydie Arickx translates by fragments of body, faces which retract, osseous backs and hands sealed in offering. Louise Bourgeois wrote about Francis Bacon a text which throws light on the idea of impulse. “He did not look at the things but painted from desire. To paint was an interior voyage, and thus its relation to the real world was obviously deformed. Bacon painted the impact of adrenalin in the nervous system that the obsessional need to express causes” In the same way, Lydie Arickx endeavours to deny the form registered of her temporal context but painting after painting, distils precise sequences like these bodies offered while falling, in the effort, in tension or in abandonment.
This choreography obliterates the anatomy, she appoints a way of “writing the drawings”, starting with a da sh, on the basis of something seen to be extracted, an abundance of marks like will-o'-the-wisps which formulate, more than they enclose, a strange maceration of matter, earth or flesh one does not know any more, marbling, pigment retention, cracks, aqueous streams or holes which create crevasses on the paper.
That one observes the faces carried out on these brown backgrounds, portraits on rare Tibetan papers, taken at a low-angle shot, nostrils offered like a tracked animal, mouth open wide like in the “The Scream” of Munch, and one will find this particular use of layering and the sedimentation of the colour to depict an ancestral humanity, ageless, but not painless. Because these imagined bodies, “turning around to reveal themselves” or these faces which could have called themselves, “These heads on which we walk”, divulges Lydie Arickx, evoke a base, a heritage and an aggregation of the ages and human generations in which we live. In the same way, these small white porcelain heads, obtained by biscuit firing, form, joined together like a bouquet of lilies, a kind of precious frieze of different and common faces.
Faces of the rising dawn whose singular union seems to take force by fixing a remote space, invisible and yet perfectly tangible. Thus, this “state of grace” in question throughout this exhibition, signs, here and now, a vital creation, an attention related to the experiment of disappearance, as the painful notebooks depict, joined together under the title “Ecume de mère” (“ Mothers/sea spume”), pages of notes and drawings detailing, even in its more abrupt aspects, the narrative of the hospitalization and the recent passing away of the artist’s mother.
It is among the beautiful drawings which exist about suffering, the withdrawal of the breath, the retracting body, the fading face. In echo, these new works present spreading bodies, revealing glances wich consider everywhere a serene face to face. Relieved. Death is a humus, mourning a condition.
Laurent Boudier 2005
