Cécile Lobert “Unspoken”

Shrine

[Image: Cécile Lobert "Untitled" (2022) acrylic on canvas, 63 x 47.50 in.]

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Working horizontally across her family’s dining room table in Brussels, Belgium, Cécile Lobert creates frenetic nonrepresentational paintings that are powerful examples of complete abstraction. Her canvases are filled with wide-sweeping, staccato brushstrokes made with punchy neon colors deftly set against contrasting deep hues. While the works are still wet, Lobert scrapes hair brushes through her atmospheric color fields leaving parallel scored lines that come in and out of sharp-focus. All of her gestures are executed intuitively with precise force and intention.

Beyond the sheer level of discovery and invention in her artworks, Cécile Lobert treats the act of painting in a fashion that feels both punk rock and contemporary. Her intense color palettes are unconventional and instantly feel rebellious, and the artist often takes her defiance a step further by abandoning fully-loaded wet paint brushes on her canvases mid-stroke to dry and add dimension. We will never know exactly why these brushes are tendered to her canvases forever, but it feels like an important physical statement acknowledging an awareness, and statement, that she is proudly different.

In addition to their visual complexity, Cécile Lobert’s paintings express inner thoughts and feelings that she is unable to voice in a traditional manner. Lobert is neurodiverse and has been completely non-verbal since early childhood. Growing up the daughter of an ambassador and a professional opera coach led to frequent moving around, and her youth was spent living in the United Arab Emirates, Libya and France. During this time it became clear Lobert’s life would not take a typical path.

The act of painting has developed into Cécile Lobert’s primary means of communication. She came to abstract expressionism instinctively, and art making has become a highly sophisticated and expressive act for Lobert; it is her strongest means of giving voice to an inner landscape unknowable to the outside world. Despite this added layer of abstraction veiling her intentions, the artist has generously left the door open for us to discover our own space for meditative and provocative silence within her works.

Cécile Lobert (b. 1992) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Unspoken is her first American exhibition and collaboration with the gallery.