In an art world of continuous hype and diminished expectations it is refreshing to encounter the beautiful abstract paintings of the French artist Noémie Rocher.

In the past 25 years, late modernist art teaching has increasingly succumbed to the fiction that the values of the so-called Academy…meaning disciplined skills based on drawing from the living model and the natural motif… were hostile to ‘creativity‘. What has disappeared is the realisation that the philosophical beauty
of Mondrian’s squares and grids begins with the empirical beauty of his apple trees.

The consequences of this are tediously evident in the the shrill sloganeering of so much contemporary work whose repetitive subject matter of gender, race, identity and ‘progressive‘ politics are the result so often of a flash in the pan response to unassimilated mass media and instagram images and ‘messages‘.

The victim of this hectic and hasty cultural ingestion is above all the loss of the practice of patient CONTEMPLATION. And to fully appreciate Noémie’s paintings it is essential to do precisely that. Look at them as connoisseurs have looked at paintings throughout history… not assessing them cursorily for their future market value.

Her works are paintings which are the fruit of many months application of Chinese ink and acrylic on canvas. Intellectually and visually alive as she is to many currents of artistic life today, her works beat their own unique aesthetic path, immune to fashion and the dictates of the market. The process in her works allows her “to establish a temporal relationship with both the medium and the overall painting. In so doing I hope to have the work evince the melancholy of the passing of time as it shifts within a cycle of light, darkness and oscillating shadows….”

The works emerge, through the sublimation, not of some political program, but out of deep reserves of feeling which she has managed through great effort to control into a moving pictorial language. The paintings are abstract, elusive, misty and translucent and the result of her scrutiny of tiny incidents hovering in a large field, delivering no message but that of distilled emotion.

Unlike some of her contemporaries who, for all their intelligence, are insufficiently impressed by the mysteries of life, she chooses ink as her prime medium of expression precisely because it’s elusive fluidity can capture the combination of metaphysical tension and poetic ambiguity that is the principal theme of her art.

She has an extraordinary mastery over these veils and receding depths of paint. And the light is always right. Nor are these veils spontaneous. They are the result of persistent retouching with the sweep of her brush. One is tempted to speak of her work in terms of perfected visual taste, analogous to natural pitch in music. Her counterpart in music is the silky, subtle, undulating surface of Debussy.

In the last years of dedicated work, Noémie has been celebrated in numerous exhibions in Europe, but her ravishing paintings have now begun to attract an attentive international audience which is looking forward to her forthcoming major exhibition in London.

Michael Goedhuis, 2019

“I would not say that melancholia is an expression of grief but rather a sensation, a void or vacuum within which a monotonous echo resonates, tinging emotions like a passing atom might affect the passage of another. If for a moment we could visualize this state of being we would find ourselves inhabiting a painting by Noémie Rocher, where, as if in deep space, we were witnessing an aurora penetrating the darkness in veils of oscillating luminosity. We have the sensation we are witnessing the light of dusk and the light of dawn simultaneously, as if both were existing by duality, as if life was moving between the euphoric and the resigned. These paintings have an awe and metaphisicality that might be found in a Casper David Friederich or in a painting of St Francois of Assisi by Zubaran where a source of light quietly illuminates to reveal the melancholic contemplation with the adulation of the sublime (detail)”.

Danny Moynihan (art critic)