MUSÉE INTERNATIONAL D’ART NAÏF DE MAGOG

61, rue Merry Nord
Magog, QC
CANADA J1X 2E7

Phone: +1 819 843-2099

The high quality of Fabienne Delacroix’s art is quite interesting, knowing that she was trained in a naive tradition, which makes her production even more worthy of attention. However, two questions were raised when we analyze her offer:

– How can we qualify her art?

– Are we still finding ourselves in front of a Naive Art creation?

The ease with which she solves the problems of perspective, defines the realism of postures of her characters and creates the paintings and illustrations of particularly meticulous compositions gives us an impression to deal with a talented classically trained artist.

Of course, she preserves the characteristics of Naive Art, which is the taste for finding and highlighting “simple and innocent pleasures”, for clustering in islands the characters occupied with distinct activities associated with a central theme of the artwork, and, obviously, for a rich color pallet. Her choice of topics, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, oftentimes related to childhood memories, reflects a certain sensibility that can be associated with Naive Art. But in terms of visual arts language or, in other words, the solutions choices to the problems of composition and figurative description, her art places her, in our opinion, on the side of classical figurative artists.

She possesses and uses all the tools of the painter, for whom representation of reality no longer presents a mystery.

Compared to the work of naive artists who I sometimes call a “refined naive” to be distinct from more primitive styles, her art is of distinctive elegance that brings honor to her profession of the painter. What I am saying, simply, is that it represents a certain fracture with Naive Art.

If Fabienne Delacroix’s work has a strong and evident connection with the art of her father, Michel Delacroix, whose work belongs, without a shadow of a doubt, to the domain of Naive Art, it is not quite the same. His presentations are viewed from the perspective of characters and cars, his buildings seem positioned one on top of the others, often without any effect of perspective, and his massive compositions are all characteristic of Naive Art, which we do not find in Fabienne Delacroix’s works. However, just like hers, his works offer us the scenes of every day with the background of city buildings.

Fabienne Delacroix’s style constitutes a phenomenon that is very interesting for us, for it brings to attention the frontier, established with difficulty, that separates Naive and figurative art.

Fabienne Delacroix’s artistic career obviously is remarkable, which makes her an essential naive artist on the international scene.

Michel Forest
MIANM Director
Musée International d’Art Naïf de Magog