Arpaïs Du Bois

About Arpaïs Du Bois

Belgian artist Arpaïs Du Bois navigates through the world of both the image and the written word, on a journey to look for poetry and beauty where important questions on life emerge as well. Her work is about slowing down the pace of life, a philosophy that drives her in the daily practice of filling journal-like sketchbooks which play a key element in her artistic life. Her developed system of noting down what many overlook and bending the bow between image and the written word has made her a fierce observer and commentator of the small systems in which we live, as well as the big world in which we attempt to make our small systems work. Approaching dystopia with a necessary dose of humour has characterised her work since the beginning of her career.

Drawing, to her, is the continuation of thinking. She is a drawer/thinker, a thinker/writer, a writer/drawer. She materializes. She positions herself as an observer and storyteller. Her work cannot be categorized within the anecdotal, illustrative, narrative current of contemporary art, nor within the abstract, minimalist one. Although each of her works is a link in one long chain, every piece can be read and seen as an autonomous statement.

Arpaïs Du Bois' visual language is easily recognizable through key elements of signature colours, refined forms and scattered phrases (that are not titles, but elements of the work itself) and offers both aesthetic, playful, critical and intimate approaches to our reality. When studying her drawings and paintings you feel her deep engagement with the world, and at the same time her need to withdraw from it. Not out of indifference, but from a desire to understand, to imagine, to translate. To find a place within it. To be part of it.

Born in Ghent in 1973.