Infra le grandezze delle cose che sono infra noi,

l’essere del nulla tienne il principato.

Léonard de VINCI

 

 

Belasco‘s « gestural » abstract painting is related to the American form of this movement called « action-paiting ». Like Pollock, Belasco uses a pure psychic automatism that renders and makes explicit the real functioning of his thought without reason, morality or conscious aesthetic research being able to control the process.

 

As Joseph-Emile Muller wrote about automatic art, it is « an eruptive, violent art that springs directly from the bowels and translates the deep, unconscious reality of being ».

 

Between 1910 and 1914, the Russian Wassily Kandinsky was already painting as an expressionist, thus translating the impulses of his sensitivity.

 

Belasco is the painter of the human adventure and its avatars. When he waves his arm, his hand and his brush, this artist reveals at the same time, in his spontaneity, his soul fertile with spirituality. His informal, instinctive painting even hides a science of the craft, but everything in it is « image ». With the image, there is a « plastic thought » through which interpretive systems of the world are developed that help us to better apprehend it.

Until now, man has felt at home in pictorial space; he has looked at himself in a mirror. With weightlessness and abstraction, he is looking for a new cosmic and spiritual space that goes beyond him.

 

Surrealism was the insurrection of dreams in the realm of rationalism. This time, with Belasco, the gesture itself is autonomous, independent of the domination of the intellect. The gesture is now only a generator of pure art, although the word « art » is understood here in its sense of creative instinct, of dreamlike intuition, and no longer in that of a conventional system of conceptual and theatrical creation.

 

Didn’t Paul Valéry write about the idea of inspiration: « what costs nothing is what is most valuable; what costs is what is least valuable ». Is this not the inner world of intuitive thinking? The artist Bélasco sets the space-time values of utopia, of Henri Laborit’s « imagining man ».

 

Belasco‘s painting justifies the lucid analysis of the critic Pierre Restany published in the magazine Domus in September 1969: « Such pictorial gestures are highly significant and lead to a para-psychology that expresses itself without cultural relays through a para-language. « What is art for? » asks Michel Ragon. The artist is a « discoverer » of new signs. He makes us feel the notion of relativity.

 

In his presentation of the exhibition « rythmes colorés » devoted to Survage, Claude Fournet obviously talks about rhythms and colour, but also about abstraction and signs. He cleverly and clearly explains the complexity of creating a para-language.

 

One cannot resist quoting him, alas fragmentarily, when thinking of Belasco:

 

« From representation we pass to writing; the observation becomes different, and it is precisely from this demarcation that a new grammar is to be constituted: the « abstract » effort then corresponds to the possibility of an « in itself » of the signs which would no longer hold to their reconstitutive values but to a more elementary flagrance, in short to what Kandinsky, defines as a need « capable of weighing colour on its subtle scales, etc. » and further on, still referring to Kandinsky. Fournet writes: « All anecdotal evidence is to be discarded since it is an elementary birth of rhythm that is at stake and, through colour, its phantasmatic right to appear where it is introduced » and again: « A relationship to temporality (to its scansions to its rhythms) is affirmed which calls for a reading, the work of art no longer being the object that is determined as such (metaphysically or theologically) but a proposal of duration, a complication of space according to the arbitrariness of a sign ».

 

Is Belasco not a demiurge, a painter of meaning, creator of a cosmic universe where nebulae and exploding stars jostle each other? Belasco is not only « movement » and cosmic rhythm; he is also the architect of « structures ». As Michel Tapié, director of the Centre International de recherches esthétiques, wrote in « Itinéraire de Bélasco »:

 

« … in the most recent works we have qualitative proposals of other artistic spaces, testifying in these very abstract areas to a refinement of sensibility, and it is an essentially artistic fact to install qualities of a possible other humanism in the exploration of the immense possibilities opened up by the possible proposals of the axioms of abstraction, i.e. of the « abstract spaces » acquired : without going into artistically negligible details, it is a question, in the adventure of « structures », of the passage from a three-dimensional Euclidean rhythmically structured by simple combinations of natural numbers and their derivatives to the multivalence of general topology (continuity, limits, neighbourhoods) including the ensemblist rhythms of at least real numbers, of course qualified in some of their possible artistic overruns, and only there. »

 

Perhaps Belasco‘s art is just a game. Why not? Nothing is more tragic, indeed, than the absence of play, the absence of art in life? Is there anything more boring than today being the same as yesterday and tomorrow? Tomorrow must be the hope, the « futurible ». As Michel Ragon wrote: « The message of painters and sculptors often precedes the mutations of other arts. Monet’s impressionism preceded that of Debussy. Cézanne’s cubism preceded that of Le Corbusier. Calder’s « mobiles » preceded Yona Friedman’s conception of « mobile architecture » and John Cage’s random music. Today’s art is what tomorrow’s man will be.

 

Doesn’t Belasco‘s playful and gestural art, in its irrational plastic representations, evoke love, the only reality that is, like art, sensorial, spiritual, aesthetic and ethical? The truth is that art and love are one.

 

When we see the person and the work of Belasco, we can only be convinced of this mathematical identity as an axiomatic evidence.

 

M. Batier

Cultural Affairs Attaché

Director of the Museums of Nice

1975

Belasco strives to give an appearance of order to an uninterrupted flow of movement. By an inner impulse, he knows where and when to intervene in order to give the uninterrupted flow of movement a systematic appearance.

In time, a blurred, half-personal, half-situational picture emerges.

There are two types of movement in Belasco‘s brushstrokes: a direct movement and a questioning movement.

It is an expression of the need to keep our awareness and centre of gravity within ourselves, as we open ourselves to movement and infinity.

The true nature of a molecule or an atom is that it can escape and disappear before our eyes. Movement, as with Belasco, must be done with a certain fatality, it is a necessity to relieve suffering. In her case, it is accompanied by a feeling of tenderness.

Between the cell and the neutron, between dawn and dusk, she awaits us and accompanies us into her universe.

Alain Bosquet, Grand Palais, Paris, 1978

Bélasco or the interrogations of matter 

 

Matter can be touched, seen, weighed and heard. The senses receive it, without the need to find an intention. A painting like Belasco‘s, which is at the service of matter, could be satisfied with its simple and serious presence.

 

It is the first stage of a universe that lives and seeks no meaning other than physical. From the moment, moreover, that one wants to put it into words, one confers on it a responsibility of thought and conception. It is rare for a painter of matter to be able to withstand this ordeal of putting it into words. The miracle – let’s say: the lasting surprise – of Belasco is that she submits to this exercise, and even provokes it.

 

The result is a rich and strange duality: our senses reveal to us fully what this painting is and, at the same time, our mind discovers dimensions perfectly in tune with it. The material is thus analysed in its obvious truth, and allows for drunken extensions into the realm of poetic speculation.

 

 

If we wanted to be rigorous, we would say that the material is mixed, that it invites lacquer, that it also requires acrylic backgrounds, in short that it is of variable density. With such severe objectivity, we note that Belasco imbues it with various movements, ranging from the stroll of the hand to fulgurating rage: there is nothing that she forbids herself in what for her must be the simultaneous exaltation of the gesture, of the maternity of the eye, of the birth in a kind of self-giving that does not ask itself in what form it will find its realisation – and yet finds it with a rather infallible instinct. This strength, this abandonment to create, cannot be acquired, and it is not certain that it can be cultivated: it is natural and innate.

 

 

The first observation is therefore a vital impulse. But a single movement is not enough for Belasco: in the same canvas, whatever the first gift, it is followed by other rhythms, other outbursts. This is perhaps the most original sign of gestation in each of his works: the initial speed is only accepted if it is followed by a second speed – a counter-speed even – and sometimes by a third and fourth pulsation. The universe belongs to engines that are complementary or at odds with each other: Belasco demonstrates this with his intoxicating, unforeseen panting.

 

 

What are forms? Here again, it is not a question of fabulating, nor of translating too lyrically what is happening, which might be happening. The forms are compact, they press against each other or, sometimes, they give the feeling of replacing each other. They suggest their flight or their permanence because they are, whether Belasco likes it or not, geological in character. White – which often happens to them – they enjoy their own milky slowness. Brown, they do not hide their eruption. The painting accepts its own hazards: bubbles, scum, and then graphs, those more voluntary. One discovers lattices, glazes, vitrified places, filaments that throw an additional mystery into the painting.

 

 

Why, finally, should we fail to define the dreamy and metaphysical significance of this art? The cosmic elements celebrate here endless nuptials, sometimes happy, sometimes voracious. Where are we, and in what era? It is important that we ask ourselves these questions, because they ask us to question ourselves, even though they offer us no easy comfort. To be a poet – we understand that Belasco is fully a poet – is to melt into a kind of state of cosmic danger, as on the first day of creation, and as on the last.

 

 

This is to say that lyricism is unforgivable. Comets and galaxies telescope, even though they do not want to admit their identity as comets or galaxies. Earths – but in which solar system? – are erupting, unless they are just a perpetual threat. There is no certainty in this atmosphere except in a kind of perpetual panic.

 

 

We will still wonder about the temperature of these materials, to see that they push back the limits of Cartesian measurements. The incessant metamorphoses do not promise any stable image, although it is sometimes on the threshold of its own delimitation. This is because will and choice are never absent from this opera of space. Carried along in her momentum, Belasco knows where and at what moment she must intervene to give the epic of movement a semblance of order. Semi-characters and quasi-situations appear. The gesture can thus be of two kinds: immediate and time-bound. It is that our share of consciousness and reasoning gravity must not be lacking in our openness to the unknown and to the infinite.

 

We are the molecule or the atom of a universe whose honour is to escape us, or to constantly remake itself before our eyes. And yet – as with Belasco – it must be by a kind of necessity that can overcome anguish. His interrogations of matter include a sensual sympathy: over there, far away, unless it is within us, between cell and neutron, dawns and twilights await us, of which we need not be afraid.

 

Alain Bosquet, French Académy, April 1975

The Art of Bélasco

 

Two primordial forces characterise Belasco‘s art: the music that always seems to animate his painting, and a spiritual quest that is its ultimate goal, but also its primary meaning and its constant search.

 

André Breton hated music « because it is indeterminate… » but I believe that Belasco‘s paintings could well have changed his mind. For me, she is one of the painters closest to what is called pure music, and suggests, through the filter of the eye, the refined orchestral masses of the impressionist musicians, the architectural outlines of the contemporary composers, or the grandiose post-romantic symphonies. Many of his works are the plastic echo of major scores in the history of music: Stravinsky (the « Rite » of course), Varèse, Messiaen, Bruckner, Shostakovich. This remark, however, is less relevant to the latest evolution of her work over the last ten years or so; music still inspires and guides her, but it is now a more diffuse, more interiorized climate, as her painting has become even more imbued with religiosity. This major evolution reflects, very subtly, the discovery of the Far East, and especially the culture and civilisation of Japan, starting with its fascinating spirituality.

 

Japan has strongly impregnated Belasco‘s painting with its spiritual omnipresence, his creative impulse has been tinged with a very specific refinement, his enlarged palette has become denser. The most immediate feature of his art, this primordial communion with the universe, is now combined with that sense of immanence that Zen thought transmits to us with, for example, his admirable gardens of stones and sand.

 

Belasco‘s art is a spiritual quest, the radiant fruit of a simple mediumnity. In his works, poetic intuition precedes the alchemy of the gaze, and leads to those regions of the soul where time is abolished, music sublimated, where the spirit contemplates eternal suns, luminous galaxies.

 

Roger BOUILLOT

Radio man and art critic

Contributor to the magazines « L’amateur d’art », « Arts » and « L’Oeil

12 February 1990

The sumptuousness of Belasco‘s work strikes at the heart and amazes undecided imaginations. This is the dominant impression of the first encounter, instantaneous, irrepressible, directly connected to the sensory complex.

 

 

A great « bang » always original and permanent, generator of miracles: nebulae of other worlds, enchanted forests, ships of the high seas, flowers of imaginary gardens, grimoires with magic formulas of impenetrable ideations and secrets that she dares not reveal.

 

 

These apocalyptic structures, this choice of chance, presuppose a state of grace and, perhaps, the cunning of a Lilith who wants to exacerbate men’s desire by veiling her physical fantasy and by exposing, in full canvas, the imaginations of her unknown self.

 

Robert Charroux

Bélasco at the service of emotion

 

The poetic arabesques, audaciously cursive, of Bélasco‘s graphics, where forms and colours constitute a whole, are hardly similar to the voluntarily pulpy graphics of Odilon Redon, and even less so to that of Moreau. Without enthusiasm, there is no creation, such is Bélasco‘s gospel. Enthusiasm is a wonderful word, » wrote Bernadette Bariteau. In fact, it is often the key word that commands our actions and dictates our inspiration and achievements.

 

Bélasco‘s work, bewitching, magical, prophetic vision, all seductive and mysteriously indefinable evocation, gives the feeling of a work expressed in total freedom, responding only to the unwritten laws of intuition and aesthetics. The artist feels the desire, so natural in fact, to recreate the world in the image of his dreams, hence the unusual and poetic reality of this work, which is highly sensitive. Is this not precisely what the artist is known for?

 

Francis B. Conem

The three dimensions explode under the pressure of a movement that seems to spring from the very bottom of the canvas. The colours swirl, the shapes clash: Belasco is the modern painter of the apocalypse.

 

Yet there is nothing gloomy about these series of explosions: the power and ardour that gave rise to them seize the viewer and stimulate his imagination.

 

The presentation of Danièle Belasco‘s works in the MIKIMOTO gallery will allow the Japanese public to become familiar with a particularly brilliant aspect of contemporary French painting.

 

Gérard Coste

Cultural Counsellor

French Embassy in Japan

These « Fantasmagories » aptly designate paintings that freely translate dreams that cannot be said to be all sweetness or serenity, so much so that a feverish exaltation seems to carry the artist’s brush away.

 

The titles given by Bélasco to some of her paintings, which she is exhibiting at the Drouant Gallery, indicate the direction of her inspiration: « Meteor storm », « Night of fire », « Symphony of the Darkness », « In the heart of the storm ».

 

The large black and white graphic compositions are full of lyrical ardour and as if lifted by a male energy, which is all the more surprising from a young woman who, moreover, does not abandon anything in life of her natural attributes.

 

When she is tempted by the prestiges of colour, a kind of dreamlike poetry emanates from these fluid tones, these fleeting, iridescent shades, this language whispered like a confession on a trembling lip and which could be described as « abstract surrealism ».

 

I don’t know if this is her first exhibition in Paris. In any case, it reveals an imperious will and rare gifts as a painter.

 

Frank Elgar, « Des Idées, des Arts, des Lettres, des Sciences », Revue « Carrefour », 1972

To greet Belasco… as it is in itself…

 

« The dispensation of being a child who plays, who pushes his pawns on a checkerboard; it is to a child that belongs the royalty.

Heraclitus, fragment 52,
translated by Heidegger (in The Principle of Reason)

 

Being one and plural, unitive and moving, such is Belasco‘s affirmation in the germinating profusion of a demanding creation that masks the necessary organising effort to generate the final spontaneous spurt. Thus, this process is shared by many of the most authentic artists, who masterfully synthesize the most meticulous stages of creation and final bursting, provided that we do not forget that each of Belasco‘s worlds is a space in the making: Heraclitean and not Parmenidian, she has chosen the fluctuating and protective precariousness of Becoming at the expense of the monolithism of Being.

 

This is why Belasco introduces us into a space-time that is her own and that ‘tells’ us her cosmogony, which as a poet she manages to share with us beyond the private aspect of a very interior dream. Now, cosmogony always sends us back to the Origin – the emergence – and Teleology – an end or eternities that contradict it – in a circularity that is that of the movement of the planets, of nuclear whirlpools and of the vital process. Yet Belasco beckons to the mythical word, that of the Origins, that which transcends time or tames it – almost a witch’s apprentice! – and she makes us familiar with the infinite spaces whose silence frightened Pascal. To come back to the « craft » – let me be forgiven this term – who will tell us the secrets of the chromatic alchemy of the superimpositions of glazes with iridescent shades of which Belasco‘s art is the crucible? Here again, the artist is a poet and her universe is a chaos of which she is the supreme organiser, mastering both the most constraining necessity and the most innovative contingency.

 

Without doubt, one can situate Belasco in the vast historical trajectory that goes from the ultima operas of the Giverny master to the dawn of lyrical abstraction. But it escapes any arbitrary and reductionist taxonomy, and the mistake would be to think of it in terms of pure non-figuration. Didn’t we say that she was building worlds? Her cosmogonic demiurgy thus challenges the strict refusal of the « object » in order to better reintroduce us into a sublime universe where she reigns supreme.

 

In the end, Belasco invites us to go beyond the « world » structure. Is his reverie the precarious constitution of a structure open to the dawn of a new world? Her gestating worlds, whose cryptic presence she lets us sense, are born of her real power of fantastic variation(s). Here Belasco joins the thought which, in the words of Heidegger, is « out of order ». Any imaginable cosmos transgressed, there may still be a framework, a « world », which ensures the thinkability of the « thing » thought. So can Belasco dream – can we dream – beyond all cosmicity? The painter does not provide us with an answer, for that is not his purpose. The question remains. Belasco only gives us the opportunity to dream, and in so doing, testifies with uncommon force to the possibilities of the mind to become anything at all.

 

Cosmogonism ultimately refers not only to each work, whose titles give us the opportunity to dream – and here we could possibly call upon Bachelardien’s meditation on the Elements – but also to the very future of his work, whose latest productions I would like to salute here, which are fortunately not the latest productions.

 

Jean Forneris

Deputy Curator of the Art Museum Jules-Chéret, Nice

18th July 1986

Bélasco reflects the French temperament

 

« When I feel calm, I paint in blue; when I am full of enthusiasm, I use flaming red, » said Danièle Belasco, a French painter who held her first solo exhibition in Japan at the Mikimoto Gallery in Tokyo earlier this month.

 

Her red hair seems to symbolise the fire – sometimes subdued but always present – that can be seen in all her paintings, which have been described as the apocalypse of modern art by Gérard Coste, counsellor for cultural affairs at the French embassy.

 

When I said that some of her paintings reminded me of the fiery flamenco of the gypsies, she smiled and replied: ‘My paintings are strong and violent and reflect my French temperament.

 

There are very few human beings in her work, and those that do appear seem to be the only ones left on earth. She has said, « It is because I feel that life itself is ephemeral and threatened, that this time is threatened.

 

Many of her paintings have thick, almost raised layers, and she explained that this was to give the works strength and that the top layers are transparent so that « the fire from within can burn through ».

 

Belasco said that her works were originally surreal, but that she went through several stages to develop her current style.

« My paintings are an ongoing experiment, » she said. « When I finish a painting, I am already starting the next work. For me, each painting is the beginning of a new experience.

 

She lives in Paris but enjoys travelling. In the 30 years between 1950 and 1980, she travelled to more than 30 countries, including Cambodia, South Korea, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, the Philippines, South Africa, Rhodesia, Zaire, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, Peru, the United States, Italy, Finland, Great Britain, Switzerland and Greece.

 

She takes cameras with her whenever she travels. « When I don’t have time to sketch, I take pictures with my cameras, » she says. « I especially like to take pictures of the sky and the sea. The last time I was in Japan, I photographed many sea scenes in Kyushu and the Seto Inland Sea. I like night scenes and have taken countless photos of Kyushu fishermen at night.

Belasco is reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor and looks like the type who likes parties, but she says: « I don’t like crowds; I like solitude. But most people mistakenly think I like crowds. As I am married, I have to go to parties with my husband, even if I don’t like them.

 

About painting and painters, she said that the fate of painters is that they are, in most cases, dead when they are finally recognised.

 

She has exhibited more than 70 times in Paris, Pittsburgh, Houston, Tokyo (National Museum of Modern Art, 1965-68 and 1970-77), Copenhagen, Luxembourg, Teheran, Milan, Berlin, London and Helsinki.

She is currently participating in the Salon d’Automne in Paris.

 

Shig Fujita

Asahi Evening News

22 November 1980

Belasco or the lightning woman

 

She is as red as a midnight sun, she moves, she laughs, she eats ginger and she plays with the brush and the palette like Vulcan plays with lightning, the sea and the clouds.

 

Moreover, Armand Lanoux says of her that she is all explosion.

André Parinaud says that she projects explosions of stars.

Alain Bosquet lends her the power to give the epic of movement a semblance of order.

 

And I see her very well, like a furious Amazon, doubled as a tragic Wagnerian heroine, I see her very well at the bottom of the waters of a dark lake where we know that the storms are terrible, watching for lightning, seizing it with her hands to crush it, scatter it and model it on this sandy bottom which has seen all the meteors, meteorites and other comets with or without tails which make children and old people tremble!

 

And this results in paintings, canvases, drawings that seem to have come out of the hand of nature, if nature were a woman; moreover, she is a woman, her name is Belasco, and, after sixty-six exhibitions in thirteen countries, she is waiting for you in the lovely Ra gallery in Paris, until May 13. Go there.

 

Pierre-Yves Guillain

Le Quotidien du Médecin

1980

 

Bélasco

 

She is never in Paris. Her passport is a real directory! She has seen all the skies and all the stars under countless latitudes. She has plunged her gaze into all the seas, into all the oceans. When she picks up her palette, she remembers the comets crossing the skies of Venezuela to crash into the Dead Sea, and from her canvases splashes of encounters emerge. When you look at one of them, you feel hot, you feel cold, you want to put your hands around it as you do around a brazier; when you get burnt, you dip them in the neighbouring canvas where icy oceans smoke.

 

Belasco is a woman who seeks the lost continents of an end of the world that has already arrived. She knows all the secrets of creation and of the galaxies, she speaks intimately with the most distant nebulae, and her brush brings them closer to us. When her eyes are tired of looking at the unfathomable mysteries of the universe, they look into the bowels of underwater volcanoes and discover Atlantis where Antinea welcomes her.

 

Belasco, therefore, in the company of her fires and her ice, is welcomed in turn by the Drouant gallery in Paris. But hurry up: Belasco will soon join her shooting stars. She will only be there until 19 March.

 

Pierre-Yves Guillain

Belasco

 

Belasco‘s painting has secret links with the laws that govern the cosmos. She subtracts its scansions, its eruptive movements, transposes its structures, its configurations, its nebulae and its galaxies into a pure language. The instinct of an authentic creator and her dreamlike intuition explore this poetic universe.

 

The artist is looking for signs to evoke new abstract spaces. The forms are released on the gradually tamed surface. The mutations erect metaphysical landscapes in which evocations of the first days of Creation can be recognized. The energy emanates from a material that is questioned in its complexity, worked to the point of obtaining, through glazes, verifications and applications of gold leaf, geological images suggesting cosmic phenomena with unlimited resonances. In this balancing act where will and impulsive freedom combine to penetrate the unfathomable, emotion springs forth under the pressure of the desire to write a line, to throw out stains, transfigured by chromatic interventions of extreme refinement, to let a form blossom, blistered or smooth like the filament of a comet.

 

The artist scratches, refines until the desired lyrical paroxysm. There is no doubt that for Belasco painting is an initiation. For her, travel, like music, plays a catalytic role. Her association with the Japanese master Suzuki, with whom she worked, helped her to pursue her artistic journey in a spiritual direction.

 

At the same time a quest that must lead her to the absolute and a questioning of a permanent anxiety, Belasco‘s painting is renewed by incessant metamorphoses in unison with those of the founding elements.

 

Lydia Harambourg

The Gazette of the Hôtel Drouot n°34
28 September 2001
P.32

Women, Heart in Flames!

 

We only have one life. So we want to live it to the full. Yet the journey is long and complex. Encouraged by the way other people live, one becomes more aware that everyone has their own life.

 

The Painter Belasco: Between Two Worlds

 

The underside of Beauty

When I first met her, I was impressed by her beauty and thought lightly that it was a Parisian vision. She was so stunning, I felt she was a woman in her own right, but I realise now that our ages were not so different. This was already 40 years ago. I was over 20 but I was naive and thought that the people I met in France were adults, and I strangely imagined that I would have to be over 40 to be able to date them on an equal footing. They were not impudent, but balanced adults. It didn’t seem like much, but I think for the Japanese it’s a very sensitive and important subject. This is how we are influenced by society and the education we receive.

 

From then on I kept in touch with her, but there was a certain distance between us. At that time she had just got married but was not yet a painter. As her husband’s business grew, her life and relationships changed completely.

 

Her husband once told me: « My wife, you see, tells me that she wants to find her way in painting ». This was a thunderclap for those around her, but she had long been determined. And after many ups and downs, she reached her goal.

 

Born in Dijon, she was educated in a monastery before coming to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The Second World War and the post-war period were difficult times for everyone. She sold sketches to fashion studios while learning to draw. This kind of story is common. But, being very beautiful, I think that’s why she was advised to become a model instead of selling her drawings. I say « I think » because she didn’t talk about herself, but it was easy to imagine. She later became a model for several houses and took part in fashion shows to support herself. I once attended a fashion show she was taking part in. She looked so chic in her Jacques Heim suit!

 

 

A flame far from being extinguished

Her modelling activities led her to meet her future husband. When their only son became an adult, she wanted to fulfil her childhood dream once again. It was a time of change. Her husband accepted her dream. He was both happy and worried, but wanted to cooperate completely. He knew his wife’s character and her determination to put her whole heart into it. And above all, he loved her.

 

Nevertheless, it is not easy to take the path of painting. When her husband confided in me, I didn’t know what to say. I too had wanted to become a painter after the war, and my dream had been shattered. After I started working, I continued to draw a little, but due to a problem of space, painting materials and lack of time, I gave up. I had mixed feelings because I envied his decision, especially as it is a difficult challenge.

 

It’s important to be determined first, but that’s not enough. You also have to be lucky. Life is the confrontation of these two factors. It was during this period that she met the well-known art critic Michel Tapié. He was Toulouse Lautrec’s nephew and curator of the Centre d’Art Moderne in Turin, and it was around him that the world of painting in Paris got a new start.

 

« Tapié encouraged me and advised me to continue. He looked stern in appearance, but in reality he is a generous and unprejudiced person. His attitude was sincere: he would take works by different painters home, observe them and then quietly criticise them. He observed my work and encouraged me by saying « you have possibilities ». So I can understand that meeting this exceptional art critic gave Belasco courage. His opinions transformed the world of painting, in the professional expression of the so-called « informal » arts. The movement away from the classics and traditional abstract painting had a huge influence on the younger generation of that time. In the world of cinema, it was the « new wave », while in the world of fashion, it was the arrival of young designers and the arrival of ready-to-wear. Women’s consciousness naturally changed and everything started to evolve. This story is too professional for me to continue, but it was very natural that Belasco was touched by these words.

 

« Chance appears, and it was at this time that I undertook my first trip to Japan. This trip disturbed me. I experienced a culture totally different from ours, and walls came down. All kinds of walls.

 

Not having to give up her dream

Her name is Danièle, her artist name is Belasco. After a strict Catholic upbringing during and after the war, she married the person she was madly in love with. She devoted all her strength to building a family, and to protecting it. Attentive and a good cook, she took care of her family. Combining her desire to create a happy family where life is good and at the same time pursue her childhood dream, her desire to paint abstractly. In fact, everyone has opportunities to dream, but in most cases it doesn’t last long or fails for one reason or another.

 

For a housewife who doesn’t lack anything, it’s more difficult. Because being in a so-called favourable environment does not necessarily mean being full of energy.

 

It was after the war that society in France, as in Japan, began to accept that women « work ». However, society has difficulty in accepting a woman who is a painter and whose husband supports her family. She attracts jealousy which is accentuated by her great beauty.

 

« It’s true, thanks to my husband, I can continue. I am grateful to him.

But Belasco has become a professional painter. She devotes herself to her home, to her works for personal exhibitions all over the world and for fairs, but also to various administrative matters, and to negotiating with galleries, some of which do not respect the payment deadlines.

 

In French society, where the unity of the couple is important, the role of the woman in social relations is primordial. Even if the guests are her husband’s professional relations and the environment is not always interesting, the role of hostess is indispensable. In fact, I think that these social obligations make the role of the wife not always the most pleasant one. But you can’t just stay at home and watch television.

 

Belasco wants to take care of her home in a perfect way. And her sensitivity to colour extends to choosing napkins for a dinner party and lighting candles.

 

« When my husband leaves the house in the morning, I clean up. If we have dinner plans at home in the evening, I do the shopping. And in the early afternoon, I make myself tea in a thermos, a sandwich and go to my workshop.

 

This research effort continued for 30 years, 7 hours a day. In the meantime she became a member of the Salon d’Automne. The artist-members who at first regarded her paintings as the hobby of an eccentric lady could only see in her unwavering style and will, her own style, perhaps hidden behind her own beauty. But they did not receive her with open arms. The more successful you are, the more jealous and nasty people are. Also, there is gender discrimination. This is a bit different from Japan; very courteous in appearance towards women, admirable praise on the lips, but this is only proof that men hold absolute authority. French women know this perfectly well, and while naturally practising evasion, they hold their ground. Having worked in France for a while, I can sincerely understand this feeling and to some extent I think that Japanese society today is more lenient towards women than French society. It is obvious that the historical, economic and legal approaches of French women are not as progressive and liberal as Japanese women think. It was when I realised this that I thought of writing my articles.

 

 

The « reversible » woman

« We women are reversible when we try to do things. That is to say, we have to live life « front to back ».

If you are a woman, these words from Belasco should particularly touch you. After her morning cleaning, she goes to her studio where another world awaits her. She reads a book, writes a poem, or listens to music. She undertakes other activities, and then she picks up her brushes unperturbed. There, the dimension where she worries about a stain on her husband’s tie or the preparation of dinner no longer exists. Wishing to escape, she wanders into an unknown universe, trying to find new techniques. It is such a joy to discover a future in the world of painting, but it also causes unceasing suffering, and Belasco tries to express these feelings on her canvases.

 

Why can’t one be satisfied with one’s situation when there is no discomfort? The question is asked. So why do so-called wise women stop at a certain age to look back and reflect on whether they were right to have experienced what they did? Anyone can ask this question. There may be different intensities in this question, but you cannot extinguish the fire of the flame that smolders in your heart. This little fire can appear and take different forms. For Belasco, it is painting. She seeks the fire of the universe through painting. Could it be God? Can God make the earth burn on a day of anger? Today, men are too absurd. There is so much anger in the world that she can continue to draw.

 

Continue

On my way back from the studio in an adjoining building (where Kandinsky lived), she welcomes me into the large living room of her flat. The Seine flows below her windows and the racing boats glide on the surface of the water in the colours of dusk. Suddenly, breaking the silence, his granddaughter, a university student, enters the living room. The child of Belasco‘s son, whom she had to take care of after his divorce. This was not without its difficulties, but the 18-year-old girl is not guilty. They are now accomplices and discuss sex and AIDS freely. Her granddaughter has a fiancé, so she needs to be told clearly. This is a subject on which Belasco has very advanced ideas.

 

« Our generation had an ideal of love: romance. A boy entrusted his heart to a rose. Today, young people are in a hurry. However, they are not informed enough on a practical level.

 

In Japan we lack this way of looking at reality clearly. For example, does a Japanese grandmother talk freely about sex to her granddaughter? At present, drugs and Aids are not as prevalent in Japan as in France and the Japanese population pretends not to be aware of them. It may be too late by the time we realise it. And Belasco wisely advises his little girl not to wear a T-shirt and shorts to visit her fiancé.

 

 

Her husband joins us. He is energetic and full of ideas. As soon as he sits down, he has an idea, that of going to a restaurant, because he knows very well that his wife is very tired. This pleases Belasco and at the same time we feel a certain reluctance. But Belasco, or rather Daniele, has principles and finally agrees. It is his way of expressing his love.

 

Greater than the sea. It is the sky.

Bigger than the sky. It is the soul.

 

This is part of a poem that Belasco wrote in a corner of his notebook. Playing a double or even a multiple role, she continues to pick up her brushes in the time and space she imposes on herself, searching for the flame of her heart; the flame of her universe.

 

Sahoko HATA

Best International

1995

Belasco‘s work, bewitching, magical, prophetic vision, all seduction and mysteriously indefinable evocation, gives the feeling of a work expressed in total freedom, responding only to the unwritten laws of intuition and aesthetics.

A work of great sensitivity.

 

Pierre IMBOURG

Amateur d’Art » magazine

On the occasion of the exhibition « Belasco »

 

Painting creates a new world of beauty, inspiring the viewer with endless thoughts and emotions.

 

It is with great pleasure that we present the first solo exhibition in Japan of Danièle Belasco, a woman painter who is attracting attention as a new wave in French painting.

 

Painting has established itself as a lasting cultural symbol. It is the only cultural exchange that does not require words.

 

Danièle Belasco is more enthusiastic than ever about her exhibition in Japan. She has added new works to her own masterpieces. The exhibition will include about 70 works. Her work has been well received in over 30 countries. Her strong spirit and vivid emotions are reflected in her work.

 

Hirohide Ishida

The luminous night of Belasco

 

From her terrace in the terraces of Villefranche, a young and beautiful woman watches the moon rise over Cap Ferrat, deep in the indigo sea. She loves the star, she loves the night. She points a telescope at the satellite, which has nothing to do with the necromancers’. The yellow and violent monster of the sky takes on its dimensions and expands its capes, its seas, its hells. She could be Irish, this slim woman with clear eyes, with the red flame of her hair and her love of the night and its settlement. She could also be a witch. She is certainly the daughter of Isis.

 

She is a painter. Her name is Belasco and she wants to possess the night. Everyone has their own chimeras. Those of Belasco are very old. They go back to the beginning of « civilisations », when her distant sisters ruled humanity, just out of nomadism, when men were only useless bees, when God was feminine and his star the moon.

 

If some can read in Belasco‘s powerful painting the obvious cosmic accents that Catherine Tolstoy knew so well how to express in her haikai of the West: « A waterfall in infinity overturns the stars », there is also something in it that would not be so bad as to illustrate the interplanetary journeys of science fiction, the imagery of a shepherdess of the future, in short, but it is not in this sense that this amiable witch travels, It is rather the other fourth dimension, that of the past and of the depths that she deciphers in herself, under the soft and almost malefic glow diffused by the great golden medal of the empires, when the Mothers had driven out Adam and the Sun.

 

Belasco is a painter, a fable, our history.

 

Armand Lanoux

of the Goncourt Academy, 1975

Belasco

 

A young woman with the colour of fire loves the night. She tames it. This night, stars pierce her, which she would like to steal. Japan or Singapore, Angola or Egypt, Peru or the States, the motif remains, the war of day and night, the argument of the pictorial ballet that Belasco offers us.

 

The night of Villefranche unfolds its countless blacks. All human representation vanishes. The structural carcasses rise up. Painting? Certainly, Tachist? Obviously. But above all predation, aggression, rape, forcing, cosmic possession. The fragility of women has no meaning here. This art devours. A little more and it’s Count Dracula! As soon as Belasco appears, the earth boils, burns, melts like tar, lava or lead.

 

Black and white reign supreme in this painting. The blacks, the whites. Belasco tells of their war, a gigantic battle in which the other colours only appear as mute servants.

 

Against a backdrop of aniline with science-fictional intensity, such as « real life » only shows on the outskirts of large refineries or on the shores of the Dead Sea, Belasco spreads her varnishes, plots her smears, caramelises her oriental lacquers. A witch, she tames chance.

 

She loves Gustave Doré and his droll rides, Gustave Moreau, the kitschy enchanter, Max Ernst, the birder of cruelty, Leonor Fini, the shepherdess of monsters. This redheaded daughter of Ulalume would have interested Edgar Poe as much as his painting.

 

The titles confess the intentions of the painters. At least, those which are conscious: The Bewitched Wreck, Cosmic Schism, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Magnificent Storm… They affirm poetry and philosophy. But the painter puts the poet in his place: all are compositions.

 

There is rigour in this thief of ghosts. Are we far from the figurative? I don’t think so. Belasco does not paint landscapes, but the emotions she feels in front of them. It is violent and tamed emotions that this witch of the night transmits to us.

 

Armand Lanoux

of the Goncourt Academy

 

Poetry of the spheres, legend of the spaces, in a vertiginous intoxication, his canvases trace the permanence of the Being, in spite of these fluctuating, thanks to these movements… to the rhythm of the fluids, of the ebb and flow…

 

Gerhard Leo

1996

1975 being the Year of the Woman, the City of Nice, within the framework of the Festival of the Book, could not but welcome in its gallery the masterly creations of a female artist testifying of a vigorous talent with multiple possibilities.

 

By presenting an imposing group of works by Belasco, the Galerie des Ponchettes introduces the public of the Côte d’Azur to one of the most lively aspects of the art of the last thirty years: what international aesthetics qualifies as Action Painting, where the influences of lyrical abstraction and Dadaist and then Surrealist automatism come together. Our city, where so many modern creators found a place of choice, must open itself to the most eminent forms of contemporary art.

 

However, it is not so much the passing favours of fashion that animate our delight. It is the fact that Belasco‘s art has its source not in the present, but in the unmemorable, the immemorial, which alone is capable of bringing together the tripartite structure of time. Doesn’t the man of today have to face a past that is still there and the invading wave of the future? Belasco‘s art, coming from the depths of the ages, returns to it in the poetic fulguration where Life, in the words of Nîetzsche, « imprints on Being the mark of Becoming ».

 

Jacques Médecin

1975

Belasco and her phantasmagorical universe

 

It is in Carros, near Saint-Paul-de-Vence, that I would have liked to meet her, in the heart of these clear and restful landscapes where she likes to work to escape from her Parisian setting, not far from the Bois de Boulogne.

 

It was in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré that we met, in the welcoming haven of the Drouant gallery, which has the merit of offering the art lover this vast and hushed atmosphere where the eye can wander at ease in its reverie. And God knows if dreaming is necessary to appreciate Belasco‘s paintings.

 

I think that the first word I spoke to her was to express my surprise at seeing her so different, in her appearance and behaviour, from the work she is proposing to us. There is this young woman, all joy, with the lively look, the flame hair, the laughter that bursts out at every moment, the abundance of gestures that belongs to happy people, and then there is this painting, all in distraught fulgurances, in desired or unwanted storms, in symphonies of darkness, the fruit of a personal apocalypse, whose cosmic solitude bursts out like a threat or calms down in bewitchment

 

« I have a passion for the sea », Belasco tells me. It shows… and not only the sea, but also all the rustling waters and their games, the storms, the grandiose marriage of winds and tides, all this phantasmagoria of the elements in flight, in fall, in fire, in an aura of eternity where the human figure is almost non-existent. And all this is painted with enthusiasm, which undoubtedly translates into a permanent emotion felt in secret and whose sources are to be discovered in who knows what Freudian climate…

 

As Francis B. Conem in L’Amateur d’Art, which highlighted the Belasco exhibition at Drouant: « One is not more surprised to discover that she lives in an unusual atmosphere and décor, where fantasy and disorder go hand in hand. Indeed, one cannot imagine a Belasco trapped in everyday life.

 

I am married and a mother, » she says, « but I arrange myself and things arrange themselves so that those around me not only don’t suffer, but find pleasure in it. Thus, fantasy and disorder go hand in hand for this very Parisian Frenchwoman who started out at the Fine Art School of Paris and at the « Grande Chaumière », until the day when she got tired of drawing heads and plaster pots… Then, the thirst for travel took hold of her and, for twenty years, she visited almost the entire world, from Japan to Africa, from the USA to South America, passing through the Philippines and the Middle East… no doubt to better come into contact with the elements sky, earth and water, so necessary to the landscapes of her inner world.

 

Since 1960, Belasco is known in France and in many foreign countries. Her exhibitions are in Paris, Modern Art Museum , Salon Comparaison, Salon Grands et Jeunes, Terres Latines, Salon d’Automne; in Le Havre and Grenoble, Houses of Culture; in the U.S.A., Whitehouse Galleries (New York), Jonelle Gallery (Palm Spring); in Japan, Ueno Museum of Modern Art and Nikka-Kaï Salon in Tokyo; in Denmark, Majud- tillingen Salon and Kasler Gallery in Copenhagen; in Italy, Centre for Esthetic Research in Turin, Graphic Art Fair in Ancona. In the spring of 1971, it will be Brussels… In 1968, she was awarded the Gold Medal of the « Annuale Italiana d’Arte Grafica ».

 

Belasco‘s graphics are boldly personal and it would be futile to draw comparisons. It is a tasty and unleashed poetry where blacks triumph, of course, but where superb, hallucinating or ethereal colours flare up unexpectedly. The inspiration is also very personal, although from time to time an external motif marks its imprint – the music of Messiaen’s The Song of the Birds or Debussy’s The Sea, for example. One day, perhaps, she will return to lithography (of which she has made little use) and to illustration; the magazine « Planètes » and its comic strips tempt her, of course, because of the fictional framework which, as an admirer of Wells and of works of anticipation, she particularly likes. I wish, and I told her so, that Rimbaud’s Illuminations or Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror could enter into the climate favourable to her creation; Belasco‘s fantasy and disorder could find new images there, so much so that the prior agreement seems obvious to me.

 

In the meantime, let us marvel at Belasco‘s phantasmagoria, let us be invaded by his rivers and cyclones, let us listen to his dialogues of the wind and the sea… it is worth it.

 

Jacques Nielloux

Belasco

 

It is with Wagner and Debussy that Belasco most easily forgets our world and enters a universe of pure force.
The music not only breaks the sensual link with reality but also triggers the sources of a vibrant inspiration. It discovers, then, its adventure and its space, the world of rhythmic structures.
Above all, the poetry of forms and colours, of spurts and stains – and her paintings become cosmic.
Her magic is in the line of Gustave Doré, Ernst, Gustave Moreau and she manages, with figuration, to make us participate in the power of the dream that inhabits her.
It is that she translates, first of all, his emotion, the ebb and flow of the wave that possesses him.
Her sorcery is love, that is his secret.

 

André Parinaud

Phantasmagorical lyricism

 

The first thing you notice about Daniele Belasco is her red hair, then her laughter and finally you discover that this tall, beautiful woman and mother has travelled the world over the last 20 years, having studied at the Fine Art School and the Grande Chaumière in Paris.

 

Belasco is modest about her work and only talks about it if asked. Cultured, a globetrotter, happy and beautiful, she keeps her work as a painter a secret: anxiety, tension, sensitivity, and difference.

 

Her painting is not like her, in the sense that it seems to be the opposite, a kind of untamed and hallucinatory poetry, abandoned to the elements, to the winds, the waves of a superb lyricism.

 

In her paintings she tells us that there is a world of permanent emotion, of phantasmagoria, of disorder and structure where only human power has this fantasy; and it is not our last surprise to note the rigour of her talent in the use of black and gold, in the way she prepares the backdrop, composing a drawing and offering us new images that remind us of the clamour of the great forces of life.

 

Belasco exhibited in the most famous Fairs: « Comparaison », « Grand et Jeune », « Automne ». Most museums in the world have bought her paintings: Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, Denmark: Copenhagen, Turin, New York. She never talks about it as if she wanted us to forget her success, and it is only by chance that you will know that she is exhibiting at the same time this month in Houston at the Crawford Gallery, at the Rotunda Gallery in London and at the Arte Cortina Gallery in Milan. This would make an artist proud, but for her it means more work.

 

André Parinaud

« La Galerie »

February 1973

The fantastic world of Bélasco

 

Belasco exhibited at the Galerie Drouant his story-paintings illustrated with poems by Catherine Tolstoi.

His painting tells us that there is a world of permanent emotion, of phantasmagoria, of the disorder of structures where the forms of letters obey only their fantasy.

 

We see the rigour of his craft in the use of blacks and golds, in the way he prepares the backgrounds, composes a picture and delivers new images to us, like the sound of the great forces of life.

 

All the works in this exhibition resemble a kind of unleashed poetry, hallucinating, delivered to the forces of the elements, a superb lyricism.

 

André Parinaud

L’Oeil, art magazine, n° 236

March 1975

The art of painting is the language of the other, of this unknown foreign being who has not taken shape, haunts and upsets our destinies.

The art of painting is the chance given to the unknown part of our dreams.

The art of painting is the affirmation of our double and the rediscovered unity of ourselves.

 

This is what Belasco tells me, a frail, beautiful and smiling young woman who speaks to us of a fantastic world and plunges us into the mystery of origins, into the heart of galaxies or cells, into the titanic battles where possible lives clash; a wild mix of the abominable and the sublime. The names she gives to her works (multiple presence, unleashed dements, the beginning of a world, celestial interference…) are formulas escaped from poetic intuition that confirm and baptize the discoveries she brings in her nets of great depth.

 

She reveals to us the mysteries of life and death. She carries out her secret life before our eyes. And this birth is fascinating.

 

André Parinaud

La Galerie – Jardin des Arts

February 1975

Belasco translates into his painting impulses that are so many enigmas about ourselves. What is the source of the power that drives an artist to possess the world by recreating it? And us, to live, devoured by the ineluctable time? The answer is undoubtedly in the spirit’s refusal to accept the absurd and the fatal, and to try to mark each passing moment with the fingerprint of being, as if to try to retain the fluid of days in our empty hands. On the white canvas, Belasco projects explosions of stars, expanding nebulae, whirling galaxies, as if she had witnessed the birth of worlds; but also, one could say, sets of seaweed twisted by the currents of the depths, where the images of eroded wrecks are those of minerals, plants, mythological monsters that sketch out their forms under her dazzling brush? And who is painting: a man, a woman, an androgynous? What part of us silently cries out the tragedy of being before the unknown?

 

Belasco creates in music, and her arm is the feverish extension of the ocean of sound in which she plunges like a naiad, not to isolate herself but to live beyond rational logic and reasonable behaviour and to reach that second state which is perhaps childhood regained. What I know for sure is that Belasco has found, through painting, the state of grace that allows him to glide through life like a sylph, as if anguish, doubt, horror and disgust did not exist. Her art wants to place us on a level where only the values of mystery, poetry and dreams count, offering us an entry into the surreal, and each canvas is like a liberating talisman.

 

André Parinaud

La Galerie – Jardin des Arts

Itinerary of Belasco

 

The art of this century, with Dada as its zero moment, bears witness to that exceptional event in History which is the passage not from one School to another, but from one axiomatic to another axiomatic: it is nothing less than a change of power, a rare event that our History had not yet experienced.

This is valid, I think, for all branches of knowledge.

 

Art is a marvellous testimony on this scale, since it engages in its creation as well as in its « consumption » (psycho-sensory perception) all the conditioning and all the possible reconditioning of our psycho-biological reflexes: the pathways of Belasco‘s pictorial work are intimately linked to this adventure of art and of the notions linked to it. All the works in this exhibition show the itinerary between two axiomatically definable extreme positions, with the intermediate works testifying to the randomness of the search, the passage that is in fact the intersection of these two subsets.

 

Chronologically speaking, we first see works that bear witness to a long experience acquired in the sensitive search for a kind of evanescence of visionary magic. One thinks of certain prophetic research by Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and the « phantomism » of Henri Michaux’s early watercolours: an extreme world of the « image » pushed to its extreme power of bewitchment at the antipodes of the false problems of formal trompe-l’œil, the magic playing on a kind of pan-spatialism.

 

At the other end of this series, in the most recent works, we have qualitative proposals of other artistic spaces testifying in these very abstract areas to a refinement of sensibility, and it is an essentially artistic fact to install qualities of a possible other humanism in the exploration of the immense possibilities opened by the possible proposals of the axioms of abstraction, i.e. « abstract spaces » acquired without entering into artistically negligible details, it is a question, in the adventure of structures, of the passage from a three-dimensional Euclidean rhythmically structured by simple combinations of natural numbers and their derivatives to the multivalence of general topology (continuity, limits, neighbourhoods) including the ensemblist rhythms of at least real numbers, of course qualified in some of their possible artistic overruns, and only there.

 

In this sense, Belasco‘s aesthetic-artistic intuition participates in the free exercise of his own sensitivity in this adventure which is that of other art and this exhibition demonstrates that the underlying axioms, however abstract, do not in any way exclude the freedoms of artistic incarnation which is the very fact of art and the raw material of all possible aesthetics facilitating the « readings » that lead to enchantment.

 

Michel Tapie

Aphorism inspired by the works numbered 25 and 37

The message of Bélasco

 

Belasco‘s artistic message shows that an artist of today can, installed in the aesthetic world, freely exploit the play of structures with a view to a content of enchantment where the pretextual image, definitively outdated, only represents an artistic evidence among the possible multitude of aesthetic messages.

 

Michel Tapie

Cyrus Gallery, Paris

Insofar as the « work of art » radiates an INCANTAMENTO (enchantment + incantation), Belasco‘s paintings are, essentially, works of art. A particularly creative aesthetic phenomenon of our « now », in highly traditional countries such as Japan or Iran, is the intersection at least and the union at most between a long tradition still alive and the most advanced structural problems of our time, where scientific philosophy has provoked a fabulous epistemological overtaking. Belasco‘s work finds the intuitive artistic « Type » (1) to this power: student of the scholar Takashi SUZUKI, his aesthetic message is at the level of a civilization worthy of this name because it has become « other », in a fabulous overcoming.

 

(1) In the sense of Bertrand RUSSEL’s theory of types.

 

Michel Tapie

July 1971

Exceeding the artistic acquis of spatial qualifications as « other » than personal in the contribution contributing to the release of the bases of a normally post-Dada aesthetic. Belasco does not hesitate to advance in the investigation not of a simplicity linked to the beautiful classical monovalence, but of the indefinitely complex multivalence turned towards a marvellous future of which the authentic amateurs can and therefore must from now on seek to be happily subjected to other enchantments radiating from these bewitching polyptics at the same time as artistically-aesthetically happily closed ensembles.

 

Michel Tapie

March 1975

Belasco‘s work in progress is protected from all dangers of academic sclerosis by an ambiguity itself in constructive progress, for the sole enchantment of those who, loving Art, ask much of it, if not almost everything, in an optimal freedom…… And how much the amateur feels as free as deeply enchanted, precisely by this euphoric freedom that Art proposes to the artist and demands of the amateur, who loves what is artistically and aesthetically worthy of being loved first in the adventure of intersection with the work, then in an enchantment of inexhaustible continuity Belasco continues to become aesthetically, in his authentically marvellous artistic adventure.

 

Michel Tapie

19 January 1977

Bélasco

 

Like many artists of our time, Belasco has chosen to renounce the immediate visible in favour of the autonomy of the « object-painting » alone, convinced that the unknown offers more investigative potential than its opposite. This commitment in no way implies that her vision disdains the vibrations of the outside world. On the contrary, she feeds on it and is impregnated by it, so that the dominant inflections, which weave the foundations, dialogue with the great flows of the universe, festooning her works with a swarm of harmonies and dynamic explosions of equal emotional density.

 

Belasco thus develops his sense of art as close as possible to cosmic rhythms, but by privileging the states of his inner dimension more than sensory effusion. Of course, the structure of his wefts is naturally based on the spontaneity of the gesture, and therefore on the direct emission of his sensations, but passed through the filter of an awakened mind where each form supports its neighbour in a concerted sequence, instinct and reason combined in the same regulating impulse.

 

Of Spanish origin, but without resorting to the usual clichés, Belasco is at the same time the heir of a secular culture, of a particular way of feeling and sensing the living, whose echoes punctuate her informalism with vehement and shady accents typical of Spanish painting. She knows, however, how to calm her outbursts and cover her canvases with fine modulations that give the measure of the diversity of her pictorial register.

 

But most of the time, her works appear to be lifted by muffled gusts of wind, spasmodic forms in expansion, crossed by flashes of harsh light, all generally supported by non-colours, hence a certain tendency to dramatise the climates, attenuated by the supple, light-hearted exchanges.

 

The whole of Belasco‘s approach breathes in the measure of his restless spirituality.

 

Gérard Xuriguera

Demeures et Châteaux n°85

« Arts et Gens »

October 1995