Press release
For her third solo exhibition at Galerie Dix9, Karine Hoffman continues her spiritual quest by drawing on Victor Hugo's epic poem "The End of Satan". First evidency, some sentences such as "Avait pris les étoiles" (Had taken the stars) or "De nouveaux jours brillaient" (Some new days were shining), are fragments of the famous text that become titles of several paintings. But if the title can give a reading track, the mystery remains in each of the canvases.
Each painting by Karine Hoffman is an enigma of which no one will really have the key. In these "huis clos" of which she has the secret, the eye and the spirit move, collide with objects, seek in the chiaroscuro an exit that in fact does not exist. In these never-named places, in this imaginary house continually re-visited by the artist, walls and floors as well as doors and windows are hidden- they are made interior. The outside and the inside interpenetrate, they dispute the pictorial space making unstable our vision, our certainties as to the exact nature of the dramas that are played. Because it is an introspective painting, made of ellipses, selective memory, missing links.