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The pictorial balance of Del Aor

Even if we had not known, we might just have been able to guess that Del Aor,
a French painter of Catalan origins, maintains a close relationship with mathematics. In her beautiful personal exhibition at the Pinxit gallery, the artist reveals her link with the world of math through a highly precise formal quest dominated by structured rationality, which however is not exclusively locked onto the need for defined and inalienable parameters. Her world is indeed composed of clear colours and precise shapes, and it is one in constant search of meaning. A meaning that she is visibly looking for along the path of norms and scanned portrayal, without tawdry clutter or formal dispersion. Balance is the value that dominates the portrayal of the world according to Del Aor. Her works are marked by a geometrical rigour which translates to the juxtaposition of sharp, strong colours and a series of closed lines whose shape is apparently simple, but actually very complex. The same goes for the dense succession of question marks which build up in clearly identified, circumscribed spaces as a metaphor of the question. The actual empty spaces become important spaces, like the cells of a fully evolving organism destined to move towards shapes unknown even to the artist. Space and colour combine to form a poetic structure, an icon, like an essential signal to which is linked a cognitive wealth of a much broader dimension, that of an artist who has attained her current level of research through the emptying of spaces. Her works assume their meaning through a suggestive viewpoint that is not defined by the principles to which we are presently accustomed. The result is complex with versatile effects and, confronted with the works of Del Aor, the observer will be torn between surprise and the lack of any specific point of reference, or at least of a pre-established path. The artist calls her works "non-suits", evoking a contemporary notion of modern anthropology to refer to the spaces of everyone and no-one, territories whose singular dimension closes onto itself without managing to recognize opportunities through which to latch onto others. And while Khalil Gibran was right in saying that "I am a navigator and a traveller, and each day I discover a new region of my soul", a journey into the "non-suits" proposed by the Pinxit gallery essentially turns into an opportunity for knowledge and quest. The journey proposed through all the works assembled here is a journey through the regions of the soul, a way to rediscover empathy between being and appearing, between what is felt and what is portrayed. The "non-suits" would then become spaces in which we notice different ways to achieve a critical examination of our feeling, between the meanders of a need for limpidity and something else that everyone will know how to find by their own devices.
Quite simply.

Massimo CENTINI
Corriere dell’Arte - June 12, 2004

Pure shapes in power...

Her name could have been taken straight out of a Duras novel.
Yet Del Aor's real roots lie further south. Catalonia, with just a sufficient dreamy smattering of the East.

With tense rigour and sparing use of signs, shapes become established through their infinite accuracy. The coy little flower of hope or life in the minimalist garden inhabited by ideograms: this is Del Aor. "We advance through the irrational..." And here is Del Aor gently and firmly guiding us over these fragile paths. Gold-Blue-Black and then Gold-Blue-White, or again Black-White-Gold and Blue-Black-White. The surprise of colours. This is where Del Aor searches for the smile of plenitude hovering just above the obvious. Mystical? Maybe, the way Francis of Assizes was in absolute uncomplication. Yet here we see an outstretched hand much more than any renunciation. If for you exactingness in art has a value of asceticism and free exercise of intelligence, then you surely need to go and see Del Aor.

J.P. CHARLUT