Welcome in the world of Geneviève Van der Wielen

A world of nubile girls, of teen-agers dressed as angels or cupids, of middle-aged women, of husbands or lovers with moustaches.
Each painting is a scene displaying a piece of the comedy (or tragedy) of life and of human nature.
Geneviève Van der Wielen draws from her experience and from the observation of the outside world in order to render, with a gap induced by humour and allegory, an illustration of our own contradictions, of our weaknesses, of the bright and dark sides of our personality....

Look at "La Marionnette" ("The Puppet on a String"): the young woman pulls the strings of the relationship with her lover, whom she discards after use;
look at "L'Aspirateur" ("The Vacuum Cleaner"): here it is the macho man who wins and the woman is reduced to a kind of domestic slavery;
look at "Paternité" ("Paternity"), probably the most suggestive painting of fatherly tenderness.
In "Ibiza" have a careful look at the bride's face, and you will grasp Geneviève Van der Wielen's wit. Other paintings allude to the cruel innocence of childhood, to the transition from childhood to adult age, often with a deliberate touch of eroticism.

Drawing from other inspirations, some paintings are based on real life facts. The splendid "Pietà", dated 1996, in which the mother is depicted in a baroque-like contorted position, was inspired by the tragic paedophilic Dutroux affair, which moved all of Belgium in that year. "Alzheimer" recalls the horror of end-of-life derangement. "Journée des femmes" ("Women's Day") illustrates the contradiction between official discourse about women's role and real life (sexual or religious domination by males).;

Other paintings are humorously alluding to Art History: "Fontainebleau", a revisiting of Gabrielle d'Estrées' painting, or "St Sébastien" (St Sebastian), an original interpretation of a great gothic and Renaissance theme. We capture a kind of look of connivence between the young bowman visiting the museum (did he shoot the arrows?) and St Sebastian, who for a while loses his usual painful or ecstatic expression.

Have you noticed that all young girls have similar faces? In fact they resemble Geneviève Van der Wielen , who herewith proposes herself as an example of the strength and weakness of our humanity.

Although oils on canvas are the most spectacular part of Geneviève Van der Wielen's work, her production of drawings in black and white is also very important. The same subject will thus be treated in several ways and in several states with charcoal on paper, and finally with colours on canvas.

The purposefulness of Geneviève Van der Wielen's work is the result of the combination of a "clear line" drawing, of a distribution of forms and colours thoughtfully distributed, and of an imagination that finds in her pictorial technique the necessary bridge to the expression of the artist's sensitivity.