By Danielle Paquin:
Catherine de Moncan's work-figurative, intimist and brimming with expressive strength-draws its source from introversion and its dénouement in the hypnotic attraction it exercises on the viewer. Between the two it plunges to the heart of all that is human.
From impressionism she has retained the use of vivid colours, a very split stroke, the representation of contemporary life and light as the essential and moving element of her painting. But the influence stops there since her painting largely transcends her technique to join quasi-psychoanalytical and resolutely present concerns.
She works alone in her London studio, painting interiors or utterly modern portraits. Sharing her time for the past forty years between painting and literature, the artist paints as one reads, attentively and assiduously. Her choice of models is dictated by a search for uncompromising authenticity. Her way of seeing evokes a certain personal melancholy that is exempt from ail self-indulgence. She draws from the source of her primal wounds and observes the traces of their lives on the faces of her models. She lingers over each feature and reveals their pain, their suffering, their weariness, their loneliness and their disappointments, but then too, their enthusiasms and their excesses. She draws all these small hollows that have formed their features over time and in their lives with a great deal of tenderness. Emotion shines through. A past is intuited. And one suddenly feels involved by the portraits of people one has never met.