Francine VAN HOVE, 1942 ✿

Francine Van Hove is a contemporary French painter, born in 1942 (France), she lives and works in Paris. Francine Van Hove’s painting is exclusively based on young women staged in her studio. Her process starts with an idea of subject, translated into graceful poses by her models and refined by many preparatory drawings to verify that it looks natural.

Her everyday life scenes keep a kind of mystery under an apparent simplicity. Out of the constraints of the external world, like an affront, these young women let themselves go to laziness or to enjoy some moments extracted from the passage of time. Unconcerned by their own beauty, they impose by their purely feminine attitudes a mysterious harmony, a kind of fragility too. Her intimist work reflects a feeling of incommunicability and a saving loneliness, like a retreat freely chosen against the unrest of the world.

Influenced by the ancient statuary, the Flemish and Italian Renaissance painting, Francine Van Hove seeks to perpetuate a technical virtuosity close to the one of Old Masters: a painting deliberately smooth like glass that brings a sensation of wonder by the rendering of material and the richness of details.